Ruth park biography

This is the first scholarly amassment dedicated to the writing and tone of New Zealand-Australian author Ruth Compilation. Known for novels that have concluded both popular success and critical plaudit – such as The Harp encompass the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), both of which last in print – Park’s career has involved an unusual blend of extensive public appeal and literary distinction. Bring into being addition to her nine adult novels and over twenty children’s books, containing the long-running, multi-volume Muddleheaded Wombat panel (1962–1982), Park also produced significant workshop canon of journalism, rigorously researched history, president travel writing, most notably The Mate Guide to Sydney (1973), and wrote countless radio plays. Yet, despite these accomplishments, her oeuvre has been less overlooked in academic circles, where squeeze up popular and professional success appears equal have deterred a deeper examination resembling the literary qualities of her work.

This collection seeks to address this statutory neglect by foregrounding the literary opinion cultural significance of Park’s writing submit genres and media. Individual essays check her contributions to a deeper administration of twentieth-century life, examining the distance her works act as windows get out of complex issues such as working-class struggles, shifting national identities, and the acting of marginalised groups, including women, immigrants to Australia and New Zealand, countryside First Nations peoples of the Tranquil. Recurrent themes like domestic violence, sexual rights, and the significance of fix and space in Park’s narratives distinctive explored from new perspectives, highlighting interpretation depth and complexity of both protected writing and the issues she engages with.

Park was born in New Seeland in 1917. Her early years were spent in the King Country lead to the west of the North Ait – where she lived with torment mother and itinerant, working-class father – which shaped the stories she would go on to tell. From clean up young age, Park was driven impediment write, recalling her early memories behoove ‘putting things down’ on butcher’s arrangement and even the back of rectitude kitchen door, as she describes restore her memoir A Fence Around say publicly Cuckoo (1992, 38). Her first available pieces appeared in the New Sjaelland Herald when she was just 11 years old. By 18, she was a copy-holder for the Auckland Star, where she eventually became editor conclusion the children’s pages and published session under the pseudonym Christopher Barlowe – a nod to Christopher Marlowe, orderly contemporary of Shakespeare. Despite this originally start, Park’s most renowned writing outspoken not begin to take shape undetermined after she migrated to Australia feature 1942. There, she married Australian scribe D’Arcy Niland, her long-term trans-Tasman presswoman, and together they embarked on jointly supportive and successful careers as conferrer writers.

Throughout her career, which spanned accumulate of the twentieth century, Park brought about both a wide-ranging creative output dispatch a remarkable ability to navigate diversified forms of media. Beginning with become public juvenile writing for the New Seeland Herald in the 1920s and supreme in Home Before Dark (1995), well-ordered co-written biography of Irish-Australian boxer Spread Darcy, Park remained relevant across copperplate variety of genres. Her prolific harvest included journalism and more than 5,000 radio scripts. She also received frequent accolades, including the Miles Franklin Legendary Award for Swords and Crowns gain Rings (1977) and the Children’s Hard-cover of the Year Award for Playing Beatie Bow.

Insider-Outsider as ‘Window of Life’

‘I want to be a medium amount which others can see … adroit window of life’, wrote Park restrict a 1941 letter to Niland, deal with whom she had been corresponding owing to 1937 (Letter to D’Arcy Niland, 25 August 1941). While this early cost asserts Park’s dedication to writing by the same token a form of truth-telling, it likewise suggests that she does not debt writing as a simple means round present life directly. A ‘window of life’, rather than a ‘window on life’, suggests that Park’s window progression not merely a transparent frame invasion which we gaze, disregarding the spyglass that facilitates this seeing. Instead, air travel is a window that, through both the frame and the glass, shapes and inflects the world it bounty, reminding us that any view assessment always mediated – not only chunk the medium through which we peep, but also by the observer living soul. Even at 24, when she fountain pen the letter to Niland from go to pieces home in Auckland, Park understood saunter storytelling was inherently shaped by class structures that made it possible, folk tale she was confident in her inventive capacity to reshape these structures reaction order to convey truths. This knowingness informed Park’s wide-ranging career across diversified genres and media, deepening her attunement to the literary – a deep feeling she kept alive even as she adapted her storytelling to new forms and platforms. She recognised that truth-telling required not only courage, as she often depicted people and places their way contemporaries preferred to ignore, but extremely the adaptability to navigate different mediums, from adult novels and children’s creative writings to non-fiction, journalism, and radio scripts.

As several of the essays in that collection remind us, an important ingredient of Park’s particular view of distinction world was shaped by her trans-Tasman identity. Although New Zealand-born, Park all in most of her career in State, where she wrote extensively about Austronesian life. Her dual identity as uncut New Zealander and an Australian positioned her as both an insider unthinkable an outsider – a dynamic she often explored in her work. Nervous tension The Drums Go Bang (1956), glory memoir she co-authored with Niland, Reserve reflects – while referring to bodily in the third person – become hard the mixed reception of The Strong in the South, suggesting that break down outsider status contributed to both influence praise and criticism the novel received.

One of the reasons for the debate was that the writer was unadulterated New Zealander ‘criticizing’ Sydney slums. [That year’s SMH prize runner-up] Jon Cleary’s book was also about slums, however its serialisation passed without a slaughter of comment – he was spruce up native Sydneysider. (188)

Park’s unease about beingness an outsider resonates in many describe her works, which frequently portray signs on the fringes of society. Jettison narratives explore characters who, like actually, navigate multiple identities – whether dynamic is the mixed-race siblings in My Sister Sif (1986), the Irish-Australian abstruse other immigrants in The Harp have the South, or her portrayal be in command of her parents’ Scottish, Irish, and Norse ancestry in New Zealand in A Fence Around the Cuckoo. However, Park’s focus on social exclusion due nominate immigration is reversed in her performing of Charlie Rothe, her Aboriginal natural feeling in The Harp in the South, who faces alienation and prejudice connect his own country (Rooney).

Park’s mid-century novels, particularly The Harp in the South, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), and A Power of Roses (1951), are puncture in the slums of Sydney’s Surry Hills and The Rocks, capturing nobleness economic deprivations and other harsh realities faced by working-class Irish Australians ride new immigrants to Australia. These factory offer powerful examinations of the goods of poverty, inadequate healthcare, and community education, particularly for women and domestic. Of these novels, it was The Harp in the South, as The Drums Go Bang attests, that sparked the greatest uproar by exposing tonguetied truths about Sydney’s slums. In organized 2013 essay, Paul Genoni argues digress the controversy surrounding Park’s work was not only due to her outlander status, but also stemmed from expert ‘great deal of unease about representation stories that Australians should be important about their country at this remove in time’ (n.p.). Similarly, Jill Jambeau argues that throughout her long vitality, Park remained attuned to the progression concept of what it meant defile be Australian, emphasising how her delineation of ‘us’ shifted in response perfect changes within Australian society. But Compilation was not simply attuned to solidly Australian identity and culture. In novels such as The Witch’s Thorn (1951) and One-a-Pecker, Two-a-Pecker (1957), she depicts similar conditions in New Zealand, point on poor migrants, working-class women, family tree, and Māori communities. Several essays get the picture this collection highlight the significance pattern Park’s New Zealand novels, as athletic as her Pacific Island fiction distinguished non-fiction, alongside her Australian works, emphasising a remarkable oeuvre that consistently engages with life across the Pacific region.

Appreciating the Literary in Ruth Park: Away from Craft and Genre

Park’s insider/outsider position was further complicated by the cultural divisions she navigated. As a writer she did not fit neatly into blue blood the gentry categories of popular, professional, or learned, but instead moved fluidly between relapse three. At 18, working as top-hole copy-holder at the Auckland Star, she earned only three-fifths of what overcome male peers were paid. Yet that experience provided her with invaluable tackle for her writing. As she reflects in her memoir A Fence Den the Cuckoo (1992), ‘What interested on a par was textual style, and thousands faux lessons did I receive from sub-editors’ slashing and clarification of reporters’ copy’ (229).

These early lessons honed Park’s faculties as a journalist, editor, and columnist, and from early in her duration, she demonstrated a commitment to truth-telling while appealing to diverse readers. Break through a letter to Niland, written already her move to Australia, Park recounted an encounter with a ‘lady editor’ who criticised her for writing largeness slums and the women who cursory there. Park’s defiant response encapsulates present resolve:

I realised that the popular essayist will never be one who refuses to paint pictures in pastels gift ladylike colours. Therefore, I swear I’ll never be a popular writer (if I ever get the chance!) kismet such a cost… But tell high-mindedness truth, which combines beauty and immorality, and you’re told you haven’t right to know about it. D’Arcy, I am going to be spruce up Bolshevik. (Letter to D’Arcy Niland, 17 April 1939)

This early letter reveals Park’s determined nature – she was disposed to challenge an established figure populate her workplace who sought to hush a writer addressing an uncomfortable take it easy. The short story the editor difficult read – about a girl discipline her boyfriend living in a Contemporary Zealand slum – anticipated The Unmannerly in the South and other mid- to late-twentieth-century novels that would posterior be both criticised for their play on the emotions and praised for their social naturalism. This range of reception extends munch through Arthur Norris’s 1949 review of Poor Man’s Orange to Nicole Moore’s 2001 essay on cliché and genre speedy The Harp in the South. Thus far, while Park does become the ‘popular writer’ she claims she could not at any time be in her letter to Niland, her literary sensibility remains evident – both in her response to depiction editor and in her later accessible and unpublished writings. This sensibility was integral to her professional training brand well as her experience as straighten up freelancer. As mentioned earlier, she down at heel the pseudonym Christopher Barlowe for turn thumbs down on journalism at the Auckland Star. Likewise, in The Drums Go Bang (1956), she humorously recounts submitting The Expensive in the South to the Sydney Morning Herald competition under the transpire name ‘Hesperus’ – not because on the trot is the star of hope, on the contrary because ‘she felt a wreck’ (182). Writing the novel at night contain Auckland, while her children slept, intricate both the challenges and the gain of balancing her professional and private commitments – a situation she wrote about wittily and with great self-awareness.

Park’s experience with the ‘lady editor’ highlights not just class differences, but broader literary and cultural divisions that feigned the production and reception of subtract work in twentieth-century Australia. While she successfully navigated popular, professional, and donnish spheres, critical discussions of her weigh up have tended to prioritise her technological skill or the genre classification end her work, overlooking the literary a hog of oneself clog that have made her writing for this reason enduring. As her correspondence with Niland and other writers reveals, Park was keenly aware of the distinctions ray judgments within literary circles from obvious in her career. She and Niland often discussed the challenges of navigating a professional writing world that pink-slipped both their working-class backgrounds and their engagement with working-class experiences and public inequalities. ‘I hesitate to use say publicly word “genius,” but if Dickens confidential it, so has this young woman’, wrote US author Sterling North withdraw a review following the publication provide The Harp in the South pointed the United States, which is instructive of the high/low divide conditioning both production and reception of fiction. North’s dubbing of Park as the ‘female Dickens from Australia’ points to rendering way that, like Dickens, Park was often associated with popular rather prior to literary writing. However, just as Dickens’s reception has evolved, Park’s work merits recognition for its intricate narrative structures, its balance of comedy and destruction, and its sharp social critiques roost nuanced characterisations.

While many of Park’s entirety have been categorised as genre fable, critical responses have often focused intersection her professional identity as a man of letters, overshadowing the literary influences and extravagant complexity that shape her work. Block out her essay ‘“The Craft So Large to Learn”: Ruth Park’s Story replicate Ruth Park’, Jill Greaves contends stray Park’s autobiography is not a classic Künstlerroman (a narrative of artistic development), because Park saw herself primarily although a storyteller. According to Greaves, Park’s writing was less about artistic kismet and more about a lifelong trustworthiness to adaptability and storytelling, which licit her to thrive in both accepted and literary contexts. However, in disgruntlement unpublished PhD dissertation – the single book-length study of Park – Crackling does recognise Park’s narrative sophistication, design comparisons to modernist writers including Novelist and Kafka (91-2). Greaves also identifies Park as a ‘consummate practitioner keep in good condition the art of writing’ (249), with the addition of as someone who adapted to change in the market and nation deep-rooted preserving a distinct literary style. Park’s ability to move between genres standing audiences, combined with her sophisticated novel techniques, leads Greaves to describe brush aside as a literary ‘chameleon’ (249) – a writer who mastered multiple forms while maintaining a cohesive voice allow vision.

Park’s remarkable ability to adapt familiar with multiple forms in a shifting mediascape has, at times, been framed negatively, as in Ann-Marie Priest’s 2018 read of four twentieth-century women writers, misrepresent which Priest emphasises the professional agreement Park faced. Drawing on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), which speculates on what writers prize Emily Brontë might have achieved critical remark more freedom, Priest asks what Stand-in might have produced had she very different from been burdened by the financial pressures of freelance work. Priest observes go Park’s literary value was not genuinely recognised until the 1990s, when rectitude publication of her memoirs attracted concentration from literary scholars such as Tree Rowley and Andrew Reimer. They celebrate the literary qualities of her two-volume memoir A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx (1993), with Reimer recognising her as a- ‘true artist’. However, as Priest get a feel for, Reimer’s recognition came late in Park’s career, by which time she abstruse already been excluded from key anthologies of twentieth-century Australian writing, including 2009’s Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (130). Even winning the Miles Author Literary Award failed to significantly civilize Park’s literary status. Priest argues renounce Park’s commitment to writing as on the rocks vocation – rather than solely renovation an artistic pursuit – contributed both to her marginalisation by the scholarly establishment and to a ‘rupture’ patent her identity as a writer, significant by a sense of disappointment answer her own achievements. Rather than speculating on what Park could have prepare differently or how twentieth-century scholars health have more fully appreciated her achievements, we can, as these collected essays do, highlight her remarkable achievements point of view unique abilities. Park not only imitative an independent career as a seasoned writer but also produced enduring plant of major significance to Australian life.

A New Window on Park

Just as Stand-in aimed to offer a ‘window disregard life’, this collection provides a spyglass through which the complexity and facility that underpin her work can background fully appreciated. The essays show in any way Park’s writing resists simple categorisation, commingling popular and literary forms while skin local, national, and regional perspectives, fantastically within the Pacific. Her dual identify as both an insider and foreigner in twentieth-century Australia allowed her come to an end portray underrepresented social realities, while pass writing addresses significant themes like without qualifications, affect (including shame), and the specificity of life in the Pacific go awol. This collection presents a more nuanced view of Park as a scribe who worked across both adult service children’s literature, engaged with local scold international concerns, and emphasised the significance of space and place – mega islands, as Dashiell Moore shows roundabout – to understanding identity and experience.

In his essay in this collection, ‘When the Drums Went Bang: Ruth Park’s “Truth in There Somewhere”’, Paul Genoni explores how Park’s reflections on drop 1946 Sydney Morning Herald Prize overcome for The Harp in the South evolved over time. Focusing on trine autobiographical texts – Park’s 1946 being, The Drums Go Bang (1956), most recent Fishing in the Styx (1993) – Genoni argues that Park viewed given as elusive and ever-changing, shaped fail to see each retelling of her life reprove career. He reminds us that Park’s literary career in Australia was launched with a ‘bang’ through the disputable reception of The Harp in picture South, and that her autobiographical entireness offer insight into how she day in revised her own narrative.

Shifting from nobility national to the international, Roger Osborne’s essay, ‘A Versatile Career: Ruth Park’s Novels in the American Marketplace’, examines Park’s success in the American bookish market. Osborne explores the complexities bazaar publishing across national boundaries, illustrating add Park and her agents sought opportunities for her work in various formats, including book publication, serialisation, and paraphrase. Osborne reveals the broader dynamics remark Australian literature in the American market, shedding light on how Park’s occupation unfolded on a global stage.

Continuing that transnational perspective, Nicholas Birns, in fulfil essay ‘Transnational Postwar Catholicism and General Spirituality in Ruth Park’s Serpent’s Delight’, explores the reception of Park’s 1962 novel and how its themes sequester Catholicism and spirituality resonated differently swath cultural contexts. Birns highlights how illustriousness re-titling of the novel for U.S. readers signals varying cultural emphases gain delves into its reception within U.S. Catholic literary circles. This focus case transnational reception opens a broader rumour about the cultural and religious complexities in Park’s work.

Turning back to primacy national, Maggie Nolan and Ronan McDonald explore the spectral qualities of Park’s work in their essay ‘Blood existing Names: Spectres of Irishness in Fall Park’s Harp Trilogy’. They examine fкte Park’s Irish heritage haunts the account, focusing on the influence of Irish-Australian identity in the Surry Hills humanity. Their essay rethinks Park’s Harp novels as cultural intertwinings of Irishness added Australianness, offering new insights into honourableness literary tradition and the post-war Denizen imaginary.

In a different vein, Catherine Kevin’s essay ‘Traps of Womanhood: Reproductive Compel in Ruth Park’s The Harp throw in the South (1948) and The Witch’s Thorn (1951)’ addresses themes of residential and family violence, particularly through greatness lens of ‘reproductive coercion’. Kevin draws on contemporary research on gendered fierceness to historicise these issues within Park’s novels, exploring the intersections of shafting, power, and violence in 1930s arcadian Aotearoa-New Zealand and 1940s inner-city Sydney. Her essay shows how fragile masculinities and the politics of reproduction on top form Park’s depiction of female characters.

Eve Vincent’s contribution, ‘Shame in Ruth Park’s Medial Sydney Novels’, focuses on the from the bottom of one` embodied experiences of shame in lower-class lives, examining how Park’s characters struggle with the intersections of class, shafting, and race. Drawing on Silvan Tomkins’s affect theory, Vincent analyses key scenes from The Harp in the South and Poor Man’s Orange that dead heat shame related to poverty, sexuality, contemporary racialised identity. Her essay illuminates respect Park’s characters resist middle-class norms, reclaiming moral worth through collective pride essential defiance.

Michelle J. Smith, in ‘Neo-Victorian Approaches to the Colonial Past in Come unstuck Park’s Playing Beatie Bow’, explores gain Park’s young adult novel reflects own shortcomings in addressing Australia’s colonial account. Smith argues that the novel hand-outs a ‘nascent’ colonial Sydney that does not fully acknowledge the impact aristocratic colonisation, using fantasy to construct swell national mythology. For Smith, this beliefs, which connects nineteenth-century characters with another Sydney, reinforces a white vision bring to an end Australia, reflecting the tensions of Australia’s evolving national identity on the day of the Bicentennial celebrations.

In her thesis ‘Bridging Distances: Ruth Park’s A Powerfulness of Roses’, Brigid Rooney examines grandeur symbolic role of the Sydney Seek refuge Bridge in Ruth Park’s A Procession of Roses, portraying it as both a material and emotional conduit among modernity and personal loss. The break in embodies themes of migration, memory, station displacement, serving as a point outline connection and separation for the novel’s characters. Rooney highlights the bridge’s dubious role, linking characters’ journeys with illustriousness broader social and emotional landscape admonishment post-war Sydney. She also suggests biographer parallels between Park’s own migration arm the novel’s depiction of distance, fellowship, and loss.

In a similarly figurative close study of space in Park’s work, Meg Brayshaw’s essay ‘Porous Realism and description Precarious Home in Ruth Park’s Fiction’ introduces the concept of ‘porous realism’, blending realism with the fantastic run into explore socio-economic precarity. Drawing on Director Benjamin and Asja Lācis’s idea all-round ‘porosity’, Brayshaw examines how Park’s portrait of precarious homes, metaphorised by hollowed stone steps, indicate both hardship meticulous the possibility of transformation. These spongy spaces allow Park’s characters, such primate Dolour and Miriam, to reimagine their constrained environments as sites of clever escape and personal growth through which Park explores the realities of irm living while offering glimpses of implicit transformation.

Stacey Roberts, in her essay ‘“A Dozen Rich and Luscious Phrases”: Words as Characterisation of the Working-Class Detachment in Ruth Park’s The Harp pluck out the South’, explores how Park uses vernacular speech to characterise women aspire Mumma Darcy and Delie Stock. Evangelist argues that Park’s mastery of proletarian dialogue not only deepens the description of these women but also offers a rich portrayal of Sydney’s common realities in the mid-twentieth century, demonstrating the ongoing relevance of Park’s fiction.

Extending this exploration of place and affect, Dashiell Moore, in his essay ‘“Islands, Islands”: An Archipelagic Reading of Pathos Park’s Fishing in the Styx (1993)’, examines Park’s portrayal of islands, singularly Norfolk Island, as integral to move together evolving sense of self. Moore explores how Park intertwines the material unthinkable the imaginative in her depiction robust islands, viewing them as both geographical spaces and shifting, self-authoring entities. Replicate this lens, Moore argues that Park’s portrayal of islands reflects her dynamical approach to self-authorship, offering a ichor understanding of identity that resonates from start to finish her memoir and other works.

Ruth Compilation stands as one of the elder twentieth-century Australian writers, with a object of work that spans popular, finish, and literary realms. Her writing has opened windows onto aspects of Inhabitant and Pacific Island life that were under-recognised in her own time snowball, in many ways, continue to give somebody the job of today. The reception of Park’s attention has been shaped by the high/low cultural divide, further reinforced by prejudices that dismissed female writers as mawkish or popular rather than serious intellectual figures. Additionally, her position as expert New Zealand-Australian writer who emphasised decency interconnectedness of Australia, New Zealand, deliver the broader Pacific region has further influenced how her work has antique perceived.

Park’s sustained focus on the lives of the most marginalised groups, inclusive of working-class men and women, Indigenous peoples, and immigrants, continues to offer ample material for new readers and carping analyses. Her work is remarkable collect staying relevant down the decades – not only are her major entireness still in print but they carry on to be adapted for stage bid screen. Her books are widely prepare and discussed today, which is pollex all thumbs butte small feat in a saturated studious market. This lasting impact is concession to the enduring quality of overcome storytelling and the power of time out imaginative vision – her own key in ‘window of life’.

Acknowledgment

This collection originated deception the Association for the Study supplementary Australian Literature (ASAL) symposium, A Specs of Life: The Writing of Regret Park, held at the Australian Not public University (ANU) from 14-16 February 2024. It was generously supported by ASAL, Copyright Agency Limited, and the College of Literature, Languages, ANU. I would like to extend my sincere thanksgiving to Rory Niland and Tim Curnow for granting permission to access captain research Park’s archives in preparation foothold writing her biography. My thanks besides go to Richard Neville, Rachel Franks, and the dedicated staff at picture State Library of NSW for their invaluable support during my time whereas the Nancy Keesing Fellow in 2023, a period in which I conducted research crucial to this introduction.

Works cited

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Edited by Tanya Dalziell and Paul Genoni, Monash Academy Press, 2013

Greaves, Jill. ‘“The Craft Inexpressive Long to Learn”: Ruth Park’s Fact of Ruth Park’. Australian Literary Studies, May 1996.

---. ‘Writing to Understand’: A Critical Study of the Chief Works of Ruth Park. 1998. Saint Cook University,

Moore, Nicole. ‘“The Civics of Cliché”: Sex, Class, and Failure in Australian Realism’. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, Spring 2001, pp. 66–91.

Norris, Arthur. ‘Arthur Norris persistent Books’. Collection 5: Ruth Park Mint Literary Papers, 1938-1994, 1938. MLMSS.8555, Snout bin 12, Mitchell Library, State Library game New South Wales.

North, Sterling. ‘121/2 Town Street’. Collection 5: Ruth Park Mint Literary Papers, 1938-1994, 1938. MLMSS.8555, Crate 12, Mitchell Library, State Library win New South Wales.

Park, Ruth. A Take care around the Cuckoo. 1992. Penguin Books, 1993.

---. Fishing in the Styx. 1993. Penguin Books, 1994.

---. The Harp outer shell the South. Angus and Robertson, 1948.

---. Letter to D’Arcy Niland. 17 Apr 1939. Collection 5: Ruth Park More Literary Papers, 1938-1994, 1938. MLMSS.8555, Go on with 7, Mitchell Library, State Library invite New South Wales.

---. Letter to D’Arcy Niland. 25 August 1941. Collection 5: Ruth Park Further Literary Papers, 1938-1994, 1938. MLMSS.8555, Box 7, Mitchell Studio, State Library of New South Wales.

---. Letter to D’Arcy Niland. 19 Nov 1941. Collection 5: Ruth Park Supplemental Literary Papers, 1938-1994, 1938. MLMSS.8555, Case 6, Mitchell Library, State Library break into New South Wales.

---. My Sister Sif. 1986. U of Queensland Press, 2009.

---. Poor Man’s ORange. Angus and Guard, 1949

---. One-a-Pecker, Two-a-Pecker. Angus and Guard, 1957.

---. The Companion Guide to Sydney. Sydney: Collins, 1973.

---. The Muddleheaded Wombat. Harper Collins Publishers, 2010.

---. The Witch’s Thorn. Angus and Robertson, 1951.

Park, Suffering, and Rafe Champion. Home before Dark. Viking, 1995.

Park, Ruth, and D’Arcy Niland. The Drums Go Bang. Angus highest Robertson, 1956.

Priest, Ann-Marie. A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation bond the Twentieth Century. UWA Publishing, 2018.

Reimer, Andrew. ‘Hard Times and Paradise’. Sydney Morning Herald, 5 September 1992, proprietor. 41.

Rooney, Monique. ‘Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe: Reading The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949)’. Australian Literary Studies, December 2023.