Laurens van der Post (1963) and "The Night of the New Moon" (1970). Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima based his film "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence" (1982) on the last two of these books. Following the surrender of Japan, while his fellow POWs were repatriated, van der Post chose to remain in Java, and on 15 September 1945, he joined Admiral Wilfrid Patterson on HMS "Cumberland" for the official surrender of the Japanese in Java to British forces representing the Allies. Van der Post then spent two years helping to mediate between Indonesian nationalists and members of the Dutch Colonial Government. He had gained trust
Laurens van der Post white South African has never consciously believed that the native should ever become his equal." But he predicted that "the process of leveling up and inter-mixture must accelerate continually ... the future civilization of South Africa is, I believe, neither black or white but brown." In 1931 he returned to England. His friend Plomer (see above) had been published by the Hogarth Press, a business run by Leonard Woolf and his wife, the novelist Virginia Woolf. The Woolfs were members of the literary and artistic Bloomsbury group, and through Plomer's introductions, van der Post met figures such as Arthur Waley,