Ruth Park

Ruth Park

Ruth Park (24 August 1917 - 16 December 2010) was one of Australias most-loved and awarded authors, the author of the highly acclaimed The Harp in the South and The Muddleheaded Wombat.

Park was born in Auckland, New Zealand as Rosina Lucia Park, and moved to Sydney in 1942 where she took a job working for a newspaper and met and married DArcy Niland, a fellow journalist and later author of The Shiralee. They raised five children while struggling on their freelance writers salaries.

Parks career as a writer was launched with her winning the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald literary competition in 1946 for her unpublished first novel The Harp in the South, about an Irish family set in the slums of Sydneys Surry Hills. The news of a Woman wins £2000 novel prize announced in The Herald caused a scandal amongst readers for the novels controversial themes such as of poverty, adolescent sex, wife-beating and murder. Angus and Robertson published The Harp in the South as part of Parks prize and the book was translated into 37 languages.

Park published eight more novels, including Poor Mans Orange, Swords and Crowns and Rings, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1977, and two dozen childrens books, including Playing Beattie Bow and The Muddleheaded Wombat, based on her long-running radio serial.

In Parks early career, she was contracted in 1942 by Ida Elizabeth Osbourne to write a serial for the ABC Childrens Session, for which she crafted the serial The Wide-awake Bunyip. When the lead actor Albert Collins died suddenly in 1951, she changed its direction and, which gave birth to The Muddle-Headed Wombat, with first Leonard Teale then John Ewart in the title role. The series ended when the radio program folded in 1970. Such was its popularity that between 1962 and 1982 she wrote a series of childrens books around the character.

The Harp in the South, her first novel, was labelled by many critics as "a cruel fantasy"for as far as they were concerned, there were no slums in Sydney. Howe'ver, the newly married Park and Niland did live for a time in Sydney slums located in the rough inner-city suburb of Surry Hills.

Park built on her initial success with the 1949 publication of a follow-up novel titled the Poor Mans Orange.

She subsequently wrote Missus (1985), among other novels, as well as scripts for film and television. Her autobiographies are A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992) and Fishing in the Styx (1993). She also penned a novel set in her native New Zealand, One-a-pecker, Two-a-pecker (1957), about gold mining in Otago. (Later, it was renamed The Frost and The Fire.)

Between 1946 and 2004, she received numerous awards for her contributions to literature in both Australia and internationally. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1987. Her later years were spent living in the Sydney harbourside suburb of Mosman. She died at the age of 93 and her obituary appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on 17 December 2010.

Awards

Bibliography


Novels
Childrens books
Non-fiction


SydneyNew South Wales




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