Ruth
Park: A Celebration
Marion Halligan writes on Ruth Park's novels: 'Some Sorcery in the Subconscious'
One of the delights of reading Ruth Park's autobiographies is the insight they offer into her novels. The rat, for instance, that in Fishing in the Styx (1993) sits on a window-sill, 'a composed leisurely rat . . . murderous as Set, a kitten-eater', the sneering and frightening but not otherwise harming rat we've already met in The Harp in the South (1948) nibbling a baby. It is ferociously murdered by the child's mother, the young and once more pregnant Roie, but not before it has run up under her skirt and needed to be beaten off. When Roie dies in childbirth shortly afterwards the reader remembers the rat and lives the horror of it all over again.
That's what fiction does. It takes the events of the writer's life - lived through, heard of, read about - and turns them into powerful stories. It's a process that Ruth Park is aware of, has lived through many times, but never takes for granted, never pretends to understand:
No one can truly tell how novels are written, least of all myself. Structure, plot, storyline, creation of many characters who must, absolutely must, walk, talk, and think for themselves - all that can be explained. But the primordium cannot be defined.
(Fishing in the Styx, p. 65)
Park is remembering how a child in a photograph of Sydney in 1899 stayed in her head for 30 years and emerged 'as a member of a family of decent immigrants called Bow, trying to keep up their standards in a decrepit slummocky antipodean city'. She tells us that she gazed at the photograph for hours: 'But why that child; how did I know her name was Beatie Bow? Some sorcery in the subconscious was operating in the trackless, wordless dark' (Fishing in the Styx, p. 65). This sorcery of Ruth Park's began its ensorcelling some 50 years ago when she decided to enter the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald novel competition. She looked at her life, rejected most of it, particularly the New Zealand growing up, and decided: 'There was nothing left but Surry Hills. My life there had been like a visit to some antique island where the nineteenth century still prevailed' (Fishing in the Styx, p. 138). The result was The Harp in the South. When it won, Ruth Park probably wished that she lived in a place where even the nineteenth century held some sway, so bizarrely primitive was the reaction. I remember the furore, it's one of those things I've always known about, known from adults in hushed shocked gleeful voices talking about the scandal of this novel of the slums. What shocked me when I came to look at it again was the realisation that I was six at the time; it was clearly some scandal. That was in 1946.
Ruth Park wonders what caused the outcry. Jon Cleary, the runner-up, wrote about the slums of Sydney without attracting any censure. Ruth Park suggests that it was because she was a foreigner. I think it might also have been because she was a woman, and young at that: not nice, not ladylike, to know about such things, let alone write them. And perhaps there was an assumption that slums might be seen but should not be heard.
For what Ruth Park does, in this and in its sequel Poor Man's Orange (1949), its prequel, Missus (1985), and novels like A Power of Roses (1953), is give her people a voice. Raucous, perhaps, gaudily vernacular, but full of a beautiful energy. She writes with love, not shirking the terrible detail - the rats eating the babies' faces, the abortions, the marriages, the sore feet, childbirth, indigestion, rising damp, cancer, betrayals, drunkenness; showing humanity trying, struggling, making the best, weakening, failing - but always with compassion. Even the drunken men whom she shows breaking the hearts and bodies of their women are not simply blamed; it's the drink not the drunkard, the muscat made not from smiling vineyards but the industrial products of a Texan oil well, with sweepings of barrels and beetroot colouring, the drink that is a crime of society against the people who need its comfort.
You could see her novels as a set of monuments to the human spirit. Swords and Crowns and Rings which was published in 1977 and won the Miles Franklin Award, is located in the country rather than her beloved Sydney, but the theme of this story of a dwarf is still the tenacity of humanity's desire to live and not just survive. Serpent's Delight (1953), about a young woman who invents a vision of the Virgin Mary rather than leave home is more overtly easy-going, even comical, but finally pretty black. Pink Flannel (1955), renamed Dear Hearts and Gentle People (1981), is a 'piece of light music', beginning like a fairy story with an enchanted island, namely New Zealand, and a little weatherboard house under a vast walnut tree umbrella, telling a story of youthful aunts. As Uncle Puss of A Power of Roses says: 'It's a long hard life, but there's always something to keep the heart going . . . yes, it's a hard life, but there's a power of roses' (p. 157).
The vitality of Ruth Park's language is a marvel. She disports in it
like a dolphin and so it looks easy, effortless. Like all the best art.
She tells rich stories in rich words. Irish stories, for often 'The Irish
in these people was like an old song, remembered only by the blood that
ran deep and melancholy in veins for two generations Australian' (The
Harp in the South, 1948, p. 417). I wonder whether the music of Ruth
Park's writing owes something to the powerful persuasive rhythms of the
Irish? With that syntax of misery and humour, and in the context of
Catholicism, the religion that comforts and crucifies its people. Ruth
Park tells us:
The world is full of novels in which characters simply say and do. There are certainly legitimate genres in which this is sufficient. But in real and lasting writing the character is.
(Fishing in the Styx, p. 222)
Ruth Park's readers can look back with gratitude for 50 years of novels which, along with their characters, have this powerful quality of 'isness', and give thanks for a pioneer who found a subject and a way to write about it, and in doing so taught us all to read and to see.
'a storyteller ... is all I have ever wanted to be'
Ruth Park attends the opening of the first Housing Commission flats in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills ...
... and interviews new residents about the new housing scheme
D'Arcy Niland with friend, writer Will Lawson
D'Arcy Niland with twin daughters Kilmeny and Deborah
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