Cirrus@Austlit

'This is the first scholarly collection dedicated to the writing and voice of New Zealand-Australian author Ruth Park. Known for novels that have achieved both popular success and critical acclaim – such as The Harp in the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), both of which remain in print – Park’s career has involved an unusual blend of wide-ranging public appeal and literary distinction. In addition to her nine adult novels and over twenty children’s books, including the long-running, multi-volume Muddleheaded Wombat series (1962–1982), Park also produced significant works of journalism, rigorously researched history, and travel writing, most notably The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), and wrote countless radio plays. Yet, despite these accomplishments, her oeuvre has been somewhat overlooked in academic circles, where her popular and professional success appears to have deterred a deeper examination of the literary qualities of her work.'  (Introduction)

'Rundown houses, tenements, lodging houses and otherwise unstable dwelling spaces recur in Ruth Park’s large and varied body of work. Importantly, however, these precarious homes often hold within them the possibility of transformation, escape, or transcendence. We might think of them then as porous spaces, drawing our definition from Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis’s famous use of the term to describe the interpenetration, ambiguity and improvisation that marks spatial arrangements and social relations in the ancient Mediterranean city of Naples. Despite their genesis in intense poverty and social dysfunction, porous spaces admit the unexpected, and this means porosity is potentially liberatory. In this essay, close examination of precarious, porous homes in The Harp in the South (1948), Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and The Power of Roses (1953) yields new insight into the operation of realism in Park’s fiction for adults. Specifically, the essay argues that Park’s favoured narrative mode is best described as porous realism. Her fiction for adults is not realism destabilised or undermined by other generic interlopers, but the product of her idiosyncratic and inventive combination of realism with a range of other generic modes, which interact with and extend the realist narrative in productive ways. This paper argues that Park’s porous realism is most often infiltrated by the fantastic, a mode that is ultimately motivated by belief in the capacity of fiction to challenge the forces of socio-economic precarity by bringing into being the possibility of other worlds not governed by them.'  (Publication abstract)

'As Delie Stock clashes with Father Cooley over the St Brandan’s school picnic in Ruth Park’s debut novel The Harp in the South (1948), she considers unleashing upon her obstinate opponent ‘a dozen rich and luscious phrases, thick with imagery and laden with obscenity’ (42). Such an evocative expression could also be used to describe much of the speech of the residents of Park’s 1940s Surry Hills. In this paper, I examine Park’s use of vernacular language to characterise Mumma Darcy and Delie Stock: two of the working-class women of Plymouth Street. Park’s desire to act as the ‘window of life’ drove her to depict what she saw around her as faithfully as possible, often making notes of overheard conversation and speech habits for inclusion in her fiction. The ‘startlingly lurid’ vocabulary picked up from shops, streets and shearing sheds became an integral device by which Park established what was, at least at the time the novel was published, the recognisable and often humorous working-class women of the novel.'  (Publication abstract)

'The paper considers Ruth Park’s memoirs by reflecting on three autobiographical texts: a lengthy article in the Sydney Morning Herald (1946); her first memoir The Drums Go Bang (1956, co-authored with husband D’Arcy Niland); and her third and final volume of memoir, Fishing in the Styx (1993). Each offers a reflection on the same critical turning-point in Park’s career – her controversial winning of the Sydney Morning Herald Prize in 1946 for an unpublished novel, with The Harp in the South. This was, Park declared, the moment ‘The drums went bang with a terrific sound’ (Drums 188).

'Park’s accounts of this incident are examined in the context of her observation – made while questioning her capacity to accurately frame a narrative moment in her memoir Fishing in the Styx – that ‘there is a truth in there somewhere, but like all truth, no statement of it can be final’ (210). It is argued that whenever Park recalled her life and career she modified how she expressed the ‘truth in there’ regarding the extraordinary episode of the Herald Prize, an incident that resonated throughout the span of her life.' (Publication abstract)

'Ruth Park’s inner Sydney novels explore the place of shame in mid-twentieth-century working-class lives, alert to the intersection of class with gender and race. Park is highly attuned to the complex psychosocial toll of poverty, which erodes self-worth and self-respect. She depicts moments in which intensely felt shame manifests, as well as the range of responses her characters have to their everyday circumstances and humiliating encounters. I focus in this essay on scenes in The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949) that involve more or less explicit representations of shame as awful and embodied. Specifically, my reading identifies the shame of privation, the shame of being rendered an object of study, female sexuality as a source of shame, racialised shame as historical stain and the shame of being patronised by experts and authorities. Throughout, I highlight Park’s character’s struggles against and transcendence of shame, either through outright defiance or by ignoring middle-class expertise that undermines intergenerational knowledge transmission and community norms. Finally, I show how Park’s characters invest in a source of collective pride – generosity and mutualism – which serves to recuperate their sense of moral worth.'  (Publication abstract)

'The Harp in the South, Park’s best known novel set in Sydney’s Surry Hills, and the lesser-known The Witch’s Thorn, set in a fictional town in Aotearoa New Zealand, both received criticism for being prone to the ‘scandalous’ and ‘sordid’, euphemisms for the themes of sex, violence and abortion. This article examines the novels for accounts of domestic and family violence, specifically reproductive coercion. It argues that the term ‘reproductive coercion’, which has emerged in the context of recent research on contemporary experiences of gendered violence, contraception and abortion, can illuminate the intersections of structural and intimate partner violence in 1930s rural Aotearoa New Zealand and 1940s inner-city Sydney. By considering the limits and possibilities of reproductive autonomy in the periods and class contexts in which the novels are set, this reading historicises the phenomenon of reproductive coercion while identifying continuities in gendered violence over time. These continuities are brought to light by a reading that zeroes in on the treatment of threats posed by fragile masculinities in both of Park’s novels.'  (Publication abstract)

'Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953) focuses on the inhabitants of a boarding house in Sydney’s inner suburb, The Rocks, a diverse community largely sequestered from the modernising city beyond. While the narrative's immersion within the enclave at first holds the larger city at bay, dramatic rooftop visions of the Harbour Bridge begin to open the view. The Bridge in A Power of Roses, as Paul Genoni observes, is richly emblematic of Sydney as a city. But the Bridge is also a figure of ambiguity, conjuring both progressive modernity and an underlying condition of diasporic loss. Through the Bridge, Park’s novel mobilises a poetics of scale and perspective that serves to breach the enclave and to imagine the energies of the wider city. Her young protagonist Miriam McKillop moves outward from the impoverished yet intimate world she inhabits with her beloved Uncle Puss towards adult life in the world beyond. This movement is first anticipated by Miriam’s use of her Uncle Puss’s telescope, which enables her to bridge the distance virtually. Ultimately, however, Miriam’s movement towards the city is a joining premised on an irrevocable separation. This essay considers Park’s mobilisation of scale and perspective for its poetics of the city, and its depiction of the enclave in juxtaposition with the Bridge. It concludes by noting the narrative’s play of perspectives, its crossings of time as well as space, and its uncanny echo of Park’s later retrospective account, in Fishing in the Styx (1993), of her own father’s death.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay analyses Ruth Park’s Serpent’s Delight (1962) in transnational, Australian and modern contexts. Though the manifest concern of the novel is whether the visions of the Virgin Mary allegedly experienced by a pious young woman, Geraldine Pond, are genuine or fake, the novel also shows how the Pond family in general quests for a socially viable or achievable form of spirituality. After discussing the American reception of the book as a case study of its transnational visibility, the essay will discuss the specific degrees to which the novel’s social and spiritual hopes – and disappointments – are tangibly Australian and modern.'  (Publication abstract)

'For six decades in the second half of the twentieth century, Ruth Park published her fiction and non-fiction frequently, locally, and internationally. Park’s connections with America were maintained throughout her career as she or her overseas representatives sought the best available outcome for the literary property they had for sale. The story of Ruth Park’s American career is one strand among many stories that can be traced in the complicated field of individuals and institutions that combine to provide the space in which authors reach readers beyond national boundaries through the publication of their work in book form, serialisation, translation or adaptation. Foregrounding the American side of this story illuminates the trajectories that any one Australian work might take before it is found in the hands of American readers, helping us to better understand what we talk about when we talk about Australian books, especially if those books are American ones.'  (Publication abstract)

'‘Islands, islands. An oneiric vision of islands shimmers before most inward eyes, and none of us quite knows why’ (Fishing 281). So writes Ruth Park in Fishing in the Styx (1993), a phrase that can be read as linking the beginning and ending of the archipelagic organon of Park’s oeuvre, conjuring an arrangement that mirrors the need to align complex, disparate events into a singular narrative of a life. To date, Park’s essays and fiction have not been read through an island or archipelagic lens, save for Monique Rooney’s recent work on the subject (‘The People Who Live There’). In light of Rooney’s analysis, this essay re-reads Park’s oeuvre in the wake of the archipelagic turn emerging from the field of island studies, which forms the first section of this essay. Following this, I move to consider the resonance of islands throughout the early part of Park’s literary career. This essay then concludes with a close analysis of the use of island forms to create associative links between the different events and sequences in Fishing. In the end, as Park is reported to have said to longtime literary agent Tim Curnow around the period she wrote Fishing, ‘we’re islanders’ (‘Harp in the South comes to the stage’).'  (Publication abstract)

'Fantasy narratives for young people that represented Australia’s history, prior to, and after white settlement, initially depicted alternative pasts in which the land was populated by familiar European and British magical beings such as fairies and giants. Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) marked the beginning of Australian children’s fantasy that sought to depict the country’s urban colonial history and reconcile its development into a modern nation. The time-slip novel, in which 14-year-old protagonist Abigail Kirk unwittingly travels from Sydney in the late-1970s to 1873, nevertheless engages in a similar process of importing British mythology to fill a presumed cultural vacancy in which First Nations people are erased. In Park’s novel, the folklore of the Orkney Islands, from which the family she encounters in the past has emigrated, provides the explanation for Abigail’s time travel and her place in contemporary Australia. Abigail’s time travel experience uncovers direct genealogical links between contemporary Australians and colonial settlers and the supernatural connections between Abigail and the colonial family counteract the absence of local mythical traditions.'  (Publication abstract)

'Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), famously deal with the Irish denizens of Sydney’s Surry Hills slums in the 1940s. This essay seeks to explore the implications of Irishness in these novels, and in the later prequel Missus (1985). The Harp in the South, almost exclusively populated by Irish migrants, stands also as a ‘classic Australian novel’. The characterology draws on transnational tropes of Irishness with a long genealogy that find a new context in the Australian imaginary. The essay explores the ambivalence between hereditarian and cultural notions of Irishness, the way Irish ‘blood’ is foregrounded and resisted, and its tension with Irish ‘names’.  The merging of Irish and Australian that the novel promises can only be achieved through omissions and lacunae, especially around questions of colonisation and Indigenous dispossession. Blood and names, we argue, become ways of both evacuating history and summoning it, of opening up allegiances and shutting them down, of appealing to essences and origins, and troubling them at the same time. Ultimately though, whether Irish or Indigenous, blood and names are haunted by the ghosts of ancestors from both near and far.'  (Publication abstract)