Profile of Ruth Park on Famous Like Me

Ruth Park is an author born in New Zealand who spent most of her life in Australia. She was born in 1922 in Auckland, and later moved to Te Kuiti in the north of the country with her parents.

During the Great Depression her working class father worked on bush roads, as a driver, on relief work, as a sawmill hand, and finally shifted back to Auckland as council worker living in a state house. After Catholic primary school Ruth won a partial scholarship to secondary school but this was broken by periods of being unable to afford to attend. For a time she stayed with relatives on a Coromandel farming estate where she was treated like serf by the wealthy landowner until she told the rich woman what she really thought of her. (Apparently the woman asked Ruth what she wanted to be when she grew up. When she was told a writer, the woman suggested she'd be happier as a servant.) Ruth Park claims that she was involved in the Queen Street riots with her father. Later she worked at the Auckland Star before shifting to Australia in 1942. There she married the Australian writer D'Arcy Niland.

Her first novel was The Harp in the South (1948) - a story of Irish slum life in Sydney which was translated into 10 languages. (Simple-minded critics called it a cruel fantasy because as far as they were concerned there were no slums in Sydney.) But Ruth and D'Arcy did live in Sydney slums at Surry Hills. She followed that up with Poor Man's Orange (1949). She knew hers was the Poorman's orange: pale skin, not as sweet. She also wrote Missus (1985) and other novels, as well as a long-running Australian children's radio show and scripts for film and TV. She created the Muddle Headed Wombat series of children's books. Her autobiographies are A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992) and Fishing in the Styx (1993). She also wrote a novel based in New Zealand, One-a-pecker, Two-a-pecker (1957), about gold mining in Otago (later renamed The Frost and The Fire).

Ruth Park won the Miles Franklin Award for Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), the Boston Globe Award for Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and was awarded the 1993 Lloyd O'Neil Magpie Award for services to the Australian book industry. She has never obtained wide-spread recognition back in New Zealand.

She claims to be a descendant of Dr Mungo Park, the African explorer.

Apart from her writing she also brought up 5 children. Her two youngest, the twins Kilmeny and Deborah Niland, are both successful Australian artists.

Some of her most famous works include:

• The Harp in the South (1948)
• Poor Man's Orange (1949)
• Missus (1985)
• Playing Beatie Bow (1980)
• The Muddle Headed Wombat series (1962-1982)
• Ruth Park's "Harp in the South" Novels ISBN 0140104569

Internal Links

• List of New Zealand literary figures

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