NO SUDDEN SUCCESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 399, 14 February 1947, Page 17

NO SUDDEN SUCCESS

Prize-winning Novelist is Radio Writer Too |

(Written for "The Listener" by

BARBARA

MATTHEWS

UTH PARK, the young New R Zealander who won the £2,000 award given by the Sydney. Morning Herald for an Australian. novel — the highest ptize ever offered for a literary work in Australia-is no novice in the world of letters and is well-known’ in radio circles in Australia and New Zealand. ‘Success, when it comes in the spectacular manner of prizewinning, is often

regarded by the public as a stroke of luck, but in this case it has come as a happy culmination to years of hard work and the usual disappointments that beset the hard path of the aspiring author. That Ruth Park has made a niche for herself in the radio and writing world is due largely to her unusual capacity for work and a spirited determination which overcame difficulties that would defeat most other young writers in the first round. In view of these experiences, it is not so surprising that she has given birth to. a novel which promises to place her among the foremost of Australian authors. And though it is too early to predict what status she may attain among New Zealand writers, there is interest in the fact that she was writing a novel with a setting in this country before the Australian competition results were announced. She is an ardent lover of her own country. Early Days in Auckland Ruth Park started writing in earnest when she was a pupil at St. Benedict’s College, Auckland, in 1932. By 1934 she had had about 20 stories published, mostly in Australian and New Zealand newspapers. At the age of about 18 she joined the Auckland Star as a copyholder, graduated to reader, and eventually became children’s editor, a job with many ramifications. Experience gained here stood her in good stead later in Australia. All the time she kept up a steady flow of free-lance writing. She has always had an amazing vocabulary and an unusually expressive style,

She is highly imaginative and sensitive and this may be accounted for by her ancestry, which is a blend of Scots, English, Swedish and Irish. She is a descendant of Mungo Park, the explorer of the Nile, but has no literary forebears. In 1941 Ruth Park went to Sydney © and married a young journalist, Darcy Niland. She kept on writing steadily, but found the free-lance field a hard and heartbreaking one to establish a name in. Then her husband was manpowered as a shearer to the qutback and she followed him. When circumstances forced them to part she worked, sometimes fruit-picking, or at any jobs that came her way. She even turned her hand to cooking for a shearing gang. All this was good experience of Australia and that country’s peculiar conglomeration of peoples "in the raw;’ and none of it was lost to Ruth’s pen. She kept her typewriter busy, with some fair measure of success. She also kept up her writing of children’s stories, and several were published in American magazines. It was about this time that she turned seriously fo radio work, writing children’s radio serials and plays, and -giving a series of talks about New Zealand over the ABC. « In a Sydney Slum When the shearing was over, in 1943, the Nilands returned to an overcrowded Sydney. and could find accommodation only in rooms of a slum tenement in the Surrey Hills area. A girl baby was born while they were there,-and this was a hard time, for conditions about them

were what most New Zealanders would consider incredible. In one of her articles she describes Cornwall Street, where they lived, and says: Throughout Sydney, that immense, sprawling city where riches and appalling poverty shoulder each other, you'll find many slum areas like Cornwall Street. Places like Auckland’s Freeman's Bay would be pleasant residential districts in Sydney. The houses leaked so much that often in the torrential rains they were quite flooded. . . and always there were bugs, savage, indomitable against all forms of insecticides, quite ineradicable because "‘they had. got into the walls." Drunkenness and sordidness ruled there, and kindness and true charity, too. Until you’ve lived in Cornwall Street, you just don’t know what life in the raw is, for these people were savages in clothes, as unrestrained, uninhibited and as promitive in instinct as any Fuzzy-Wuzzy. They robbed, murdered, fought, screamed, and made love in public. Saturday. afternoon, when almost the whole street was a staggering mass of foul-mouthed brawling, shrieking men and women, was a revelation to one who had been brought up in an ordinary New Zealand working-class home in a working-class suburb, as I had. Ruth Park came to New Zealand for a brief holiday when her child was a year old, and: returned to Sydney and better living quarters-a small! flat-for the birth of her boy, who is now two-and-a-half years old. Throughout all these vicissitudes she kept on writing. Her health was never good, but her typewriter was tireless. Stories for Children, Too Her consistent efforts were by this time earning reward. She wrote two children’s books which are still awaiting (continued on next page) —

| SUCCESS STORY —

(continued from previous page) publication. She has sold a number of serials and stories, some written in collaboration with her husband, to the NZBS. The titles of some of them are: "The Weather Horse," "Alice Stay-at~ Home," "The Castaways of Fire Reef," and "The Fallen Star.’ None of these has yet been recorded, but two of her séfials, "Bufinello" and "Peter. Puffington" will be familiar to NZBS childlisteners. These two sefials are shortly to be published in book form in America. Radio short stories and dramatized stories are anothet of her specialties; in fact she says she is happiest writing for radio. Her range is so wide as to be astonishing. She writes for school broadcasts in New Zealand and for school journals; she recently collaborated with her husband on a musical comedy ‘ for the NZBS, and for South Africa she wfites mostly librettos and rhyming pantomimes. The young authoress returned to New Zealand with her husband early last year for what she called "a long delayed honeymoon," bringing their two children. She was not well-in fact all her life she has been dogged by ill-health-but by May she had started to plan her novel for the Sydney Morning "Herald prize. She wanted to write up her slum experiences, and said "I ¢an always se@ things with a clearer eye when I am away from them." Although she had many distractions and interruptions, she managed to complete The Harp in the South, as she called her novel, in time, taking in all only about five weeks over the actual writing. Fairly exhausted, she set off with het husbafid on a'totir of New Zealand that léd theth down as far as Queenstown, all the time fossicking out material for new stories. At Wellington they called in at the studios of the NZBS, and to Ruth’s delight happened to meet Norman Corwin, whom she says she regards in the same light a@ the bobby-soxer does Frank Sinatra. She also has great admiration for Bertiard Beeby, chief producer of the NZBS, whose standatd of productions she considered surpassed Australia’s ir many points. In November the couple left their children temporarily with Ruth’s parents in Auckland and returned to Sydney. Stidden fame was awaiting Ruth Park there, but she had earthed it by the hard and rough toad of experience. She has "beet through the mill" to a remarkable extent for one noteyet turned 30. Already The Harp in the South is being sought after by film corfipanies: If it proves an outstanding contfibution to Australian literature, it is to be hoped that her new novel about het own countty may prove an equal sticcess.