Obituary: Ruth Park, realist author

Published on Sunday 2 January 2011 18:47

Ruth Park, Australian realist author. Born: 24 August, 1917, in Auckland, New Zealand. Died: 14 December, 2010, in Sydney, Australia, aged 93.

Ruth Park's novel about the Sydney slums, The Harp in the South, shocked Australians in the 1940s but that did not prevent her from becoming one of the country's most revered writers.

She leapt from obscurity in 1946 when her unpublished first novel, The Harp in the South, an unsparing picture of life in the Surry Hills neighbourhood of Sydney, won first prize in the Sydney Morning Herald's inaugural literary competition. Published two years later, the book became enormously popular, despite its frank depiction of prostitution, drunkenness, abortion and child abuse.

It inspired two more novels that chronicled the further adventures of the Darcys, an Irish-Australian clan rendered with vivid Dickensian strokes. The first, Poor Man's Orange, was published in the United States in 1951 as 12 Plymouth Street, and a prequel, Missus, was first published in 1985 in Australia.

Park was equally famous as a writer of fiction for young adults, notably Callie's Castle (1974) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and as the author of the Muddle-Headed Mongoose series of radio plays and books for children.

Rosina Ruth Park was born on 24 August, 1917, in Auckland, and spent her early life living in tent camps as her father built roads and bridges in northern New Zealand.

"I cannot emphasise sufficiently the importance of my early life as a forest creature," she wrote in A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992), the first volume of her autobiography.

"The mind-set it gave me has dominated my physical and spiritual being. The unitive eye with which all children are born was never taken away from me by the frauds of civilisation; I always did know that one is all and all is one."

She began placing stories, poems and articles with the New Zealand Herald and the Auckland Star, which made her the editor of its children's pages under the pseudonym Wendy.

A job offer from the San Francisco Examiner fell through when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour three days before she was scheduled to sail to the United States, and she signed on instead with the Sydney Morning Herald.

Soon after moving to Sydney in 1942, she married a fellow journalist, D'Arcy Niland, who later wrote the novel The Shiralee. He died in 1967.

Her books for younger readers typically presented children negotiating life's difficulties and overcoming their fears and anxieties.

In Callie's Castle, a ten-year-old girl deals with the stress of moving to a new home and finding a place for herself among a crowd of younger half-brothers and half-sisters.

Park wrote nearly a dozen novels for adults and nearly three-dozen books for children and young adults. Her second volume of memoirs, Fishing in the Styx, was published in 1993.