'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)
