Ruth Park

Discusses the popular appeal of Ruth Park's novel The Harp in the South in the context of Park's lukewarm critical reception.

It is tempting, but upon reflection not quite accurate, to describe Ruth Park's autobiography as a Künstlerroman, that subtype of Bildungsroman which has been…

Ruth Park’s award-winning novel, Swords and Crowns and Rings had a fascinating, and so far largely unknown, journey to publication. This article traces the editorial…

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…

Fantasy narratives for young people that represented Australia’s history, prior to, and after white settlement, initially depicted alternative pasts in which the land was populated…

For six decades in the second half of the twentieth century, Ruth Park published her fiction and non-fiction frequently locally, and internationally. Park’s connections with…

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…

Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953) focuses on the inhabitants of a boarding house in Sydney’s inner suburb, The Rocks, a diverse community largely…

This essay analyses Ruth Park’s Serpent’s Delight (1962) in transnational, Australian and modern contexts. Though the manifest concern of the novel is whether the visions…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

‘Islands, islands. An oneiric vision of islands shimmers before most inward eyes, and none of us quite knows why’ (Fishing 281). So writes Ruth…