When I first met Ken in the mid-1980s – we married in January 1987 – I must confess that I had rather romantic ideas about the writing life. Ken certainly looked like the popular idea of a writer, being tall, deep-voiced and bearded, with an unabashed fondness for nicotine and whisky, and I looked forward to many long and intense literary discussions. So I was disconcerted to discover that this sort of talk bored him rigid. Indeed, if he thought I was becoming too earnestly Lit Crit, he would shake his head at me and say, ‘Poor mad creature’. This always made me laugh, so that was the end of that.

Kenneth Cook with Jacqueline Kent

Ken was much keener on working out interesting ways of making money. He possessed the unwavering optimism of a man who is convinced that success in business is inevitable, if only he can find the right key. He was always throwing himself into projects that took him away from writing, including real estate speculation (which he was good at) and feature film-making (which sent him bankrupt). One of his most spectacular ventures was a butterfly farm on the Hawkesbury River; he was a keen amateur lepidopterist. This came to grief when the area suffered two hundred-year floods in quick succession. Like others who knew Ken, I eventually realised that it was seldom wise to get too close to his enthusiasms – and there were many.

In his heart, though, Ken was a writer, especially of fiction. Novels, he said, just happen to you; they have to be written. That was certainly true of Wake in Fright. It resulted from a stint as an ABC radio journalist in Broken Hill during the late 1950s. He wasn’t there long – only a matter of weeks, he said – but this was the latest in a series of ABC postings to country towns, and the experience evidently crystallised all the things he disliked about the Australian bush. Wake in Fright wasn’t his first novel: that was Vantage to the Gale, which was accepted by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom, only to be pulped because Ken quoted large sections of transcript from a high-profile court case. In the wake of this devastating disappointment, Ken decided that the only answer was to write another novel (as you do). Back in Sydney a year or two after the Broken Hill experience, he sat down and, in a matter of weeks, wrote the story of a disaffected schoolteacher who longs to return to the coast, but who is caught up in a five-day bush nightmare that leads to his moral destruction. Ken sent the manuscript to Michael Joseph, in the United Kingdom, who accepted it immediately.

Almost fifty years later, the anger in Wake in Fright is still shocking. It is so obviously the work of a frustrated young journalist desperate to get back to the city. In the Paterson versus Lawson dichotomy of Australian writing about the bush, Kenneth Cook is firmly on Lawson’s side. The sunlit plains around the Yabba are anything but splendid; the characters are trapped in a remorseless landscape.

Ken always said the title came from an old curse: ‘May you dream of the Devil and wake in fright.’ Maybe, but it is also a line from verses by the English poet and priest Richard Harris Barham (1788–1845). ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’ is a verse about a bird that steals a cardinal’s ring and is cursed by the prelate: ‘He cursed him in sleeping that every night / He should dream of the devil and wake in a fright.’ Although I have absolutely no evidence to support this, I have always thought that Ken learned the poem at school – it has that sort of jingling rhythm and laboured ‘comic’ tone – and that the lines stuck in his mind, to be exhumed to great effect twenty years later.

It is not difficult to pick holes in Wake in Fright, if one is so inclined. The plotting is shaky, with John Grant sinking into depravity with improbable speed; the characters are paper-thin, some almost caricatures; and the tone can be uncertain, wavering between matter-of-fact bleakness and a certain nervous jocularity. But these are minor faults, I think, when one considers the power of what the novel actually achieves. Ken put a character who is alienated from his work and his surroundings into a situation where he had to contend with the thoughtless, synthetic ‘mateship’ of the bush, where drinking took precedence over everything else, where perfunctory kindness concealed menace: You will be my mate, you will drink with me, right?

Ken was pleased when a reader told him that she thought the movie had done justice to the book, but that she liked the book better. In fact, book and film are very close, as you can see from the famous, sickening roo shooting sequence. The description in the book could almost be a shot list for the movie. The similarity is not so surprising: Ken’s economical and highly visual style and the strong narrative drive are perfect for film.

The movie (1971) has been criticised because so many of the key people involved in making it were not Australian. The director was Canadian; the British-born screenwriter had never visited Australia. Wake in Fright starred Gary Bond and Donald Pleasance, both English. But I think the presence of two Englishmen in an otherwise Australian cast gives the movie a surprising edge. Gary Bond’s English accent is meant to grate: his character, John Grant, is, after all, a foreigner, a schoolteacher who doesn’t belong in Bundanyabba, and his lack of understanding of the local culture is basically what brings him undone. It is appropriate for Donald Pleasance, as Doc Tydon, the struck-off medical man who views the world with chilling irony, to speak in a slightly clipped accent which underscores the character’s detachment.

Ken had little to do with the film. He had sold the rights for a pittance to a company owned by fellow writer Morris West, who then onsold them very profitably, keeping Ken to the original deal. At the time, Ken and West were friends and neighbours, and Ken never really forgave him, often speaking bitterly about what he saw as West’s perfidy.

The movie version of Wake in Fright played in competition in Cannes and did relatively well in Britain, supporting the view that the Brits are most interested in Australian work when it deals with life outside the cities, preferably critically. It was less popular in Australia, where it may have been too close to the bone. For some people it still is. At a recent screening in Sydney, I saw an ABC radio producer friend who told me that she had walked out of the movie before it ended. ‘It’s not a classic at all,’ she said. ‘It’s flat, it’s ugly, it’s terrible.’

Wake in Fright – book and film – is ugly, and deliberately so. Its characters are trapped in an alien landscape, defeated, stifled by convention, lack of opportunity, poverty and desperation. Their plight is summed up as early as page three of the novel as John Grant watches Mason, his star student:

Twenty-eight pupils, twenty-seven at school only because the law insisted on their being educated until they were at least fifteen, or because some desperate farmer, clawing a living from the clods of the great inland plains, thought that in education there might be for his child a little of the hope that he had abandoned. And the twenty-eighth, young Mason – eleven years old, hungry to learn, eager, intelligent and inexplicably sensitive – but doomed to join the railway gangs as soon as he was legally old enough, because his father was a ganger.

The grim nihilism that is so obvious in Wake in Fright and that surfaces in Ken’s other novels did not seem to be reflected in the man many people knew. Most saw an expansive, outsized personality who enjoyed long arguments over beer or wine, and who loved to make outrageous statements with a straight face in order to watch people’s reactions. Though Ken liked to portray himself as a kind of roaring boy, he was in fact not especially gregarious, and as he grew older and his health deteriorated, he spent more and more time writing. He used the kitchen table as his desk, squinting through taped-up glasses as he scribbled with a fountain pen in school exercise books. I still have some of these, with the identifying details filled in. Name: Kenneth Cook; School: Fort Street Boys’ High (which he attended in the early 1940s); Class: Middle; Age: 56 ¾. Inside are scrawled notes for stories and ideas for novels, with drawings of glum-looking ferrets (a throwback to the old Nation Review, perhaps).

In April 1987, a month before his fifty-eighth birthday, Ken died of a heart attack on the banks of the Macquarie River, near Narromine in western New South Wales. He had been working on a book of bush short stories, the third in a series; earlier titles were Killer Koala and Wombat Revenge, which give a reasonable idea of their tone. They display a decidedly non-sentimental view of Australia’s iconic fauna: psychopathic wombats, passive-aggressive echidnas and kangaroos in thrall to alcoholism. Some of the stories are still very funny indeed.

Ken was suspicious of the academy, believing that university types should keep their hands off criticism of Australian writing, and that they should certainly not go anywhere near his work. Because of who he was and when he lived, and because he was always considered a popular writer, he has not been given the literary recognition he deserved. (Many people are not aware that Wake in Fright was a novel before it was a film.) He didn’t especially seek to extend himself as a writer, but he knew what he could do, and he took his craft seriously. He always considered himself a professional. In his view, posterity could look after itself. ‘Wait till I’m dead and gone, love,’ he would say. ‘They might discover me then.’