AustLit

'In October 1945, just three months after Japan’s surrender ended Australia’s role in the Second World War, the Sydney Morning Herald announced that it had set aside £30,000 to stimulate the development of our art and literature, which included a £2,000 prize for best novel. Ruth Park recounts in the second volume of her autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (Penguin, 1993), that she first urged her husband, D’Arcy Niland, to enter, as the young parents had been hard-pressed to make ends meet as full-time writers in the three years they had been married. Instead, it was Park who ended up working hastily on her first novel at her parents’ kitchen table, while visiting her native New Zealand with their two children. In December 1946, Park learned that out of 175 entries, her book about the struggling Irish–Australian Darcy family in Sydney’s Surry Hills had won. The Harp in the South, wrote war poet Shawn O’Leary in the review that accompanied the announcement, ‘bludgeons the reader about the brain, the heart, and the conscience.’ It became an Australian classic, so loved that it is yet to go out of print.' (Introduction)