Cirrus@Austlit

'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)

'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)

'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)

'Ruth Park’s novels The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949) portray a fictional Irish-Australian family living in the actual inner-city neighbourhood of Surry Hills. The poor, immigrant status of the Darcys is foregrounded in the novels from the start, yet equally important is the character of Aboriginal man Charlie Rothe, who is introduced in Chapter 14 of The Harp in the South. This essay suggests that Charlie’s late arrival is the reverse of the non-fictional situation evoked in the opening of Park’s The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), in which the author imagines the First Fleet’s entry into a place that was already occupied. The issue of ‘first-ness’, and what comes after, is central to Park’s narration of both family intimacy and romantic love between her Irish Australians and latecomer Charlie. Highlighting enigmatic descriptions of Charlie’s Aboriginal parentage and ancestry and associating this language with the appropriative desire felt by each of the Darcy sisters, I argue that the character of Charlie is pivotal to Park’s exploration of themes of imitation, borrowing, possession and (belated) recognition.' (Publication abstract)

'Head south on Elizabeth Street, turn left after Devonshire. Butt Street is more of an alley, with a slight kink at the beginning. Apartments and warehouses loom either side. You are walking towards Clisdell Street in August 1940, and on the left in the gutter is the corpse of Bill Smillie, gambler, gunman, SP standover. Next to his body is a dead cat.' (Introduction)