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)

'The Harp in the South, Park’s best known novel set in Sydney’s Surry Hills, and the lesser-known The Witch’s Thorn, set in a fictional town in Aotearoa New Zealand, both received criticism for being prone to the ‘scandalous’ and ‘sordid’, euphemisms for the themes of sex, violence and abortion. This article examines the novels for accounts of domestic and family violence, specifically reproductive coercion. It argues that the term ‘reproductive coercion’, which has emerged in the context of recent research on contemporary experiences of gendered violence, contraception and abortion, can illuminate the intersections of structural and intimate partner violence in 1930s rural Aotearoa New Zealand and 1940s inner-city Sydney. By considering the limits and possibilities of reproductive autonomy in the periods and class contexts in which the novels are set, this reading historicises the phenomenon of reproductive coercion while identifying continuities in gendered violence over time. These continuities are brought to light by a reading that zeroes in on the treatment of threats posed by fragile masculinities in both of Park’s novels.'  (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)

'The paper considers Ruth Park’s memoirs by reflecting on three autobiographical texts: a lengthy article in the Sydney Morning Herald (1946); her first memoir The Drums Go Bang (1956, co-authored with husband D’Arcy Niland); and her third and final volume of memoir, Fishing in the Styx (1993). Each offers a reflection on the same critical turning-point in Park’s career – her controversial winning of the Sydney Morning Herald Prize in 1946 for an unpublished novel, with The Harp in the South. This was, Park declared, the moment ‘The drums went bang with a terrific sound’ (Drums 188).

'Park’s accounts of this incident are examined in the context of her observation – made while questioning her capacity to accurately frame a narrative moment in her memoir Fishing in the Styx – that ‘there is a truth in there somewhere, but like all truth, no statement of it can be final’ (210). It is argued that whenever Park recalled her life and career she modified how she expressed the ‘truth in there’ regarding the extraordinary episode of the Herald Prize, an incident that resonated throughout the span of her life.' (Publication abstract)

'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)