Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe: Reading Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949)

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.