Cirrus@Austlit

'‘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)