A Working Writer : Ruth Park single work   biography  
Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 A Working Writer : Ruth Park
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'The question of vocation takes centre stage in the two volumes of Ruth Park's autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. From earliest childhood, Park writes, she knew she would be a writer: 'It had been as if a voice spoke from a burning bush.' Her depiction of her vocation to the literary life contains all the classic elements of the artist's call: it came out of nowhere, it was a summons that could not be set aside or ignored, and it shaped her destiny. Normally, however, this call takes shape in a specific cultural context: the little girl who longs to be a writer begins her life as a passionate reader surrounded by books, and as part of a family or society that holds writers (in the abstract, at least) in high esteem. Park's context was very different. According to A Fence Around the Cuckoo, for the first ten or so years of her life, she had no books, and no access to books. In the early 1920s, her father was part of a work gang that travelled around remote parts of the North Island of New Zealand building roads and bridges, and until she was six years old her home was a tent. Neither her father nor her seamstress mother owned any books. Even when the family settled in the tiny town of it Kuiti, where Ruth would go to school, books were in short supply. As Park Writes in Fence, 'No one I knee. had any books.' The irresolvable problem of Poverty was compounded in the wider community by a moral distrust of all that books stood for. As Park explains, 'It was thought that reading poked your eyes out and kept you from doing wholesome things.' (Introduction)
 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon A Free Flame : Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century Ann-Marie Priest , Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018 12178428 2018 multi chapter work biography

    ''I need to be a writer,' Ruth Park told her future husband, D'Arcy Niland, on the eve of their marriage. 'That's what I need from life.'

    'She was not the only one. At a time when women were considered incapable of being 'real' artists, a number of precocious girls in Australian cities were weighing their chances and laying their plans.

    'A Free Flame explores the lives of four such women, Gwen Harwood, Dorothy Hewett, Christina Stead and Ruth Park, each of whom went on to become a notable Australian writer.

    'They were very different women from very different backgrounds, but they shared a sense of urgency around their vocation - their 'need' to be a writer - that would not let them rest.

    'Weaving biography, literary criticism and cultural history, this book looks at the ways in which these women laid siege to the artist's identity, and ultimately remade it in their own image.' (Publication summary)

    Crawley : UWA Publishing , 2018
Last amended 19 Apr 2018 06:53:38
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