Cirrus@Austlit

'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)