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Ruth Park's Memoirs #2
Fishing in the Styx
A tender portrait of a partnership, in life and in work, between two talented, volatile people, Ruth Park and her husband D'Arcy Niland. They share their dreams and disappointments and rejoice in each other's triumphs. This is the second part of Ruth Park's autobiography
302 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
7 people are currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Park
83 books113 followersRuth Park was a New Zealand-born author, who spent most of her life in Australia. She was born in Auckland, and her family later moved to Te Kuiti further south in the North Island of New Zealand, where they lived in isolated areas.
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 a serf by the wealthy landowner until she told the rich woman what she really thought of her.
Ruth claimed 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. (Some 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 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).
Park received awards in Australia and internationally.
Winner of the Dromkeen Medal.
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 a serf by the wealthy landowner until she told the rich woman what she really thought of her.
Ruth claimed 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. (Some 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 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).
Park received awards in Australia and internationally.
Winner of the Dromkeen Medal.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
December 14, 2023
The New Zealand light was lovely, gentle, sifting through gauzes of moisture, miles high. I looked at it by the hour, that island light, committing it to memory, to words if I could, for perhaps we were being too hopeful about the war, and I might not return to New Zealand for years.
The second part of Ruth's memoirs, shows her beautiful gift with words. I'm in awe of her talent.
While the book starts with some well known Australian 'characters' that Ruth knew or knew of, this is the story of Ruth's move to Australia & eventual marriage to fellow author, the Australian D'Arcy Niland. Both of them had unshakeable faith in both their own & each other's talent. I haven't read any of D'Arcy's books yet (I do have one that he wrote with Ruth, somewhere in the house - I hope to get to that next year) but Ruth was quite right. She is amazing & after Katherine Mansfield, my favourite Aotearoa author.
As well as the hardship of trying to live on authors' earnings (even reading the book, I still don't know how they managed this) in substandard accommodation with five children. Ruth does mention the eldest Anne being malnourished. & I thought my first experience of childbirth was bad, but nothing compared to Ruth's.
"Stop screeching. It has to come out the way it came in," I heard one nursing sister say, coarsely impatient, to a woman in the ultimate throes. I myself was slapped by a nurse on a painful swollen breast because I was awkward in feeding my child.
Shudder.
In the first volume, it is clear that Ruth likes rather than loves D'Arcy. Ruth definitely comes to love him & while D'Arcy always adores her his passion for writing leads him to make some self
absorbed decisions. Ruth is certainly aware that she is carrying an unfair share of the load, but loves him anyway & is devastated by his death at only 49 after years of ill health.
After all the children have grown up, she makes the decision to The book ends there, but Ruth lived a long life & died in Sydney in 2010, aged 93. I believe (& hope!) that the success of her books meant that she was able to live in the comfort she deserved.
I've said this before, but I will say it again - I do feel sad that Ruth is better known in Australia than in her native land, & urge any Kiwis to look for her books. Her two memoirs seem easier to find than her fiction. (I found this one in a Little Free Library in Auckland)
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July 5, 2018
Oh, this is a wonderful book! I said this repeatedly out loud to my husband as I read in bed each evening. Thanks to a Twitterpal who introduced me to Ruth Park, I am working my way through her books and those of her husband D'Arcy Niland. Like its predecessor 'A Fence Round the Cuckoo', this 2nd part of her autobiography is full of marvellous writing, honesty, joy and sorrow. I wish I'd met her.
Not spoilers, but tasters:
'... how was I to know then, at my age, that some griefs never heal; they glaze over with the thinnest integument, so easily cracked by a chance odour, a word, a waifish memory from God knows where. But I was to learn.'
'My law of life was an ancient Maori proverb: He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff. So what?'
'My wedding gave me the pip. The ceremony was conducted in a workworn, dusky church by a priest with a face like a rock knocked into shape with another rock.'
'My Irish Grandma, who had all her life lived so closely with poverty that she treated it with a haughty kick in the pants, held to the tradition of always giving away the last coin in her purse. Of course she took care it was a small coin; she was no dummo.'
I do have to say that the account of how shoddily Ealing Films treated D'Arcy Niland when they made a film of The Shiralee made me seriously angry. Appalling greed.
If you like to learn, laugh and weep while reading, I can heartily recommend this book!
Not spoilers, but tasters:
'... how was I to know then, at my age, that some griefs never heal; they glaze over with the thinnest integument, so easily cracked by a chance odour, a word, a waifish memory from God knows where. But I was to learn.'
'My law of life was an ancient Maori proverb: He who climbs a cliff may die on the cliff. So what?'
'My wedding gave me the pip. The ceremony was conducted in a workworn, dusky church by a priest with a face like a rock knocked into shape with another rock.'
'My Irish Grandma, who had all her life lived so closely with poverty that she treated it with a haughty kick in the pants, held to the tradition of always giving away the last coin in her purse. Of course she took care it was a small coin; she was no dummo.'
I do have to say that the account of how shoddily Ealing Films treated D'Arcy Niland when they made a film of The Shiralee made me seriously angry. Appalling greed.
If you like to learn, laugh and weep while reading, I can heartily recommend this book!
September 9, 2014
Fishing in the Styx is the second volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography, read with great sensitivity by Anna Volska on this audiobook. It is fascinating to listen to the evolution of one of our best-loved writers, writing about living in a 1960s Sydney unrecognisable today.
Ruth Park was born into poverty in about 1923 in New Zealand, and came to have a career in Australia only by chance. She was about to embark from Sydney to take up a job with a newspaper in San Fransisco when all shipping was suspended after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. A fledgling romance with the Australian writer D’Arcy Niland blossomed, and the pair decided that they would make a living as writers, surviving perilously from week to week, juggling finances and writing projects and the children that inevitably came. She writes about their struggle with humour and optimism but the sense that the light went out of her life with D’Arcy’s premature death is tangible.
Please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201... to read the rest of this review.
Ruth Park was born into poverty in about 1923 in New Zealand, and came to have a career in Australia only by chance. She was about to embark from Sydney to take up a job with a newspaper in San Fransisco when all shipping was suspended after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. A fledgling romance with the Australian writer D’Arcy Niland blossomed, and the pair decided that they would make a living as writers, surviving perilously from week to week, juggling finances and writing projects and the children that inevitably came. She writes about their struggle with humour and optimism but the sense that the light went out of her life with D’Arcy’s premature death is tangible.
Please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/201... to read the rest of this review.
November 28, 2023
Interesting to find out how much of The Harp in the South (a book I love) was based on the couple of years Park and her husband (and their first two children) lived in the Surrey Hills slums in the 1950s. The sheer grit and determination of Park and her husband D’Arcy Niland to both make a living as writers at a time when this was almost impossible in Australia is astounding. Of course Park had a much harder time of it, writing at the kitchen table after the five children were in bed.
October 27, 2022
What a life! Ruth Parks was a New Zealand writer who produced 'The Harp of the South', 'Muddle-Headed Wombat', heaps of books, short stories, radio plays, while married to D'Arcy Niland, another prize-winning writer, and raising five kids. Living through crushing poverty in WW2 and post-war Sydney, she depicted the working class slums of the city, as well as rural Australian poverty, with the honesty and hope of one who lived through it.
"Fishing in the Styx" references living with her husband and soul-mate, who had a heart condition, and knew he could die at any time over his final ten years till 50. Knowing their time together was short, they sold the house they'd struggled to buy, and tried their luck living in London, visiting relatives in Ireland, and Rome to see the Pope.
A lapsed Catholic, then Buddhist, Ruth Park describes 1968 London, where she was meeting with other Catholics to hear the outcome of Pope Paul the 6th's Second Vatican Council.
"You're not going to believe this, but the blighted old wop has come down against contraception! Of course, you know what this means- the end of the Faith as we know it."
How well she grasped the implications of the New Misogyny of the Church's Council, her first book tracked an underage Sydney girl seeking an illegal abortion in the 1940s.
As a widow, Parks lived on Norfolk Island, then traveled to Buddhist Meditation centres in San Francisco and Japan, only returning to her adult children in Australia when her own health failed.
"Fishing in the Styx" references living with her husband and soul-mate, who had a heart condition, and knew he could die at any time over his final ten years till 50. Knowing their time together was short, they sold the house they'd struggled to buy, and tried their luck living in London, visiting relatives in Ireland, and Rome to see the Pope.
A lapsed Catholic, then Buddhist, Ruth Park describes 1968 London, where she was meeting with other Catholics to hear the outcome of Pope Paul the 6th's Second Vatican Council.
"You're not going to believe this, but the blighted old wop has come down against contraception! Of course, you know what this means- the end of the Faith as we know it."
How well she grasped the implications of the New Misogyny of the Church's Council, her first book tracked an underage Sydney girl seeking an illegal abortion in the 1940s.
As a widow, Parks lived on Norfolk Island, then traveled to Buddhist Meditation centres in San Francisco and Japan, only returning to her adult children in Australia when her own health failed.
November 18, 2023
This was a fascinating read and I would like to read more of Park’s work whether fiction or non-fiction. The writing is gorgeous, and her life is really interesting- especially how she talked about her husband simultaneously being her biggest cheerleader as a writer and totally ready to take care of their children or cook meals while at the same time not having the idea that she might want her own desk.
It went from quite a lot of detail about her early marriage to less and less detail as time went on, but I was already pretty invested. Recommended if you’re interested in the writing life or life in Australia around the time of the end of the Second World War. Or if you just want to spend some time with a very cool lady.
It went from quite a lot of detail about her early marriage to less and less detail as time went on, but I was already pretty invested. Recommended if you’re interested in the writing life or life in Australia around the time of the end of the Second World War. Or if you just want to spend some time with a very cool lady.
August 28, 2014
Great read...like her stories a page turner. Loved the tales of Darcy Niland another favourite author. Her description of grief and loss at Darcy's death resonated with me and my own search for answers.
February 9, 2018
I expected this to be a warts and all autobiography about the author and her husband and their marriage. No warts. No all. Their "romance" is dismissed in one page and his death in a few lines. I wanted more.
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December 19, 2014I really liked this one too! I think I'd like to find a copy of her sydney tourist guide, would be very interesting to see what my adopted city was like once upon a time!
February 25, 2018
I enjoyed reading this autobiography of Ruth Park, after re-reading her novel, Harp in the South, for our book discussion. It helped me see how the novel was based on her experiences of living in Surry Hills and also the huge struggles she and her husband, D'Arcy Niland, had in determining to live by their writing alone, from the early 1940s. Park's mainstay was as a writer for the Children's Session on the ABC. (How many of you, Australians of my era, remember, 'Row, Argonauts, row'?!)
The title had two meanings for me - firstly the mining of her difficult daily experiences and feelings to bring forth the 'gold' of a creative work, and secondly her anxiety and depression after the early death of Niland. She talks about how some people manage their grief by turning to alcohol, drugs or comfort food, whereas she was driven to continue to write, write, write - 'fishing' the river of death for something to nourish not only her but her readers and listeners.
I skimmed some of this book, partly because certain parts didn't interest me as much as others but because, in the end, her life wasn't as compelling to me as her fiction.
The title had two meanings for me - firstly the mining of her difficult daily experiences and feelings to bring forth the 'gold' of a creative work, and secondly her anxiety and depression after the early death of Niland. She talks about how some people manage their grief by turning to alcohol, drugs or comfort food, whereas she was driven to continue to write, write, write - 'fishing' the river of death for something to nourish not only her but her readers and listeners.
I skimmed some of this book, partly because certain parts didn't interest me as much as others but because, in the end, her life wasn't as compelling to me as her fiction.
September 19, 2020
This second part of Ruth Park's wonderfully interesting autobiography, begins when she came to Sydney to live in her early twenties and met and married fellow writer D'arcy Niland. They were both devoted writer's who struggled for many years to make ends meet within the constraints of the publishing world while bringing up five children. Their strong and loving relationship with it's highs and lows is set against the background of inner city Sydney in the 1950's, as so well portrayed in her two classic Australian novels "The Harp in the South" and "Poor Man's Orange."
A recommended read but don't make my mistake and read this before the first part, "A Fence Around The Cuckoo" although both can easily stand alone.
A recommended read but don't make my mistake and read this before the first part, "A Fence Around The Cuckoo" although both can easily stand alone.
March 20, 2018
This book completes the life story of Ruth Park. As with her first book, it's her lively honest voice that most entertains. It's set mainly in Sydney. There's lots about her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. They were both dedicated to making a living from their writing. They were so hardworking and poor, it's good to know they both received recognition and success in the 1950s - 60s.
December 12, 2025
The Harp in the South
I read Ruth Park’s novel soon after moving to Sydney in 2005.
My partner was given Park’s Sydney book, so for some reason I have spent nearly 3 weeks reading both of her autobiographies!
They are addictive, especially the slow introduction of D’Arcy Niland.
I read Ruth Park’s novel soon after moving to Sydney in 2005.
My partner was given Park’s Sydney book, so for some reason I have spent nearly 3 weeks reading both of her autobiographies!
They are addictive, especially the slow introduction of D’Arcy Niland.
September 22, 2021
I love Ruth Park.
Read
September 5, 2024Ruth Park is a recent discovery for me. I started with A Fence Around the Cuckoo, an account of her early life in New Zealand which I loved. This is part two, following her moved to Australia and her life with fellow author D'Arcy Niland. An enjoyable read, but didn't lose myself as fully in these memoirs. Niland comes across as a frustrating and frustrated character. Little wonder that Park struggled with her own writing during their twenty five year marriage. And being a mother to their five children probably didn't help matters. Nevertheless I found her an engaging narrator and have since located a copy of Ruth Park's Sydney to add to my reading list.
July 6, 2016
This is the second instalment of Ruth Park's autobiography, following on from A Fence Around the Cuckoo, which covered the period of her life growing up in New Zealand.
Fishing In the Styx picks up with Park's migration to Australia in the early years of WWII, to share a life with a brash but loveable Irish Australian, D'Arcy Niland, who would become her husband and with whom she would have 5 children.
Together, Ruth and D'Arcy pursued their dreams of becoming full time writers, earning their incomes exclusively from this honorable craft.
The early years were very tough and taught them the virtue of being adaptable and pragmatic. They took on anything and everything, writing short stories, magazine articles, children's stories, radio scripts and many other things. It was financially necessary to write copy with a short turnaround to maintain a precarious cash flow.
It was years before they dared attempt a long-form novel, which took so much time and did not have a guaranteed pay day at the end of the toil.
In the early years they lived in slum-like conditions in the Surry Hills area of Sydney, which eventually provided the backdrop and characters for Park's first successful novel, The Harp In the South.
Her husband, D'Arcy Niland, also took the risk to write novels, the most successful and well known of which is The Shiralee. To research this book, he tramped around the outback of South Australia for several months.
They had children, managed to travel to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and then went on to Europe, England and Ireland.
Niland suffered from persistent health problems with his heart, and eventually died prematurely in his late 40s from a heart attack.
Park was bereft and grieved awfully at his death and struggled for along time to regain any joy for life, although she continued working hard at her craft as a matter of financial necessity.
By and by, she lived for a period on Norfolk Island, where she wrote Swords and Crowns and Rings, which won the Miles Franklin Award, and which is my favourite of her novels.
In an attempt to help overcome her grief, she became a follower of Zen Buddhism in her later years.
This is a charmingly written, honest and stoic account of a life well-lived, with it generous share of struggles and successes, celebrations and periods of despair.
It is an enjoyable and insightful look into the lives and careers of two devoted and dedicated writers covering the period of the war years, the difficult following period of adjustment and into the latter part of the 20th century.
Fishing In the Styx picks up with Park's migration to Australia in the early years of WWII, to share a life with a brash but loveable Irish Australian, D'Arcy Niland, who would become her husband and with whom she would have 5 children.
Together, Ruth and D'Arcy pursued their dreams of becoming full time writers, earning their incomes exclusively from this honorable craft.
The early years were very tough and taught them the virtue of being adaptable and pragmatic. They took on anything and everything, writing short stories, magazine articles, children's stories, radio scripts and many other things. It was financially necessary to write copy with a short turnaround to maintain a precarious cash flow.
It was years before they dared attempt a long-form novel, which took so much time and did not have a guaranteed pay day at the end of the toil.
In the early years they lived in slum-like conditions in the Surry Hills area of Sydney, which eventually provided the backdrop and characters for Park's first successful novel, The Harp In the South.
Her husband, D'Arcy Niland, also took the risk to write novels, the most successful and well known of which is The Shiralee. To research this book, he tramped around the outback of South Australia for several months.
They had children, managed to travel to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and then went on to Europe, England and Ireland.
Niland suffered from persistent health problems with his heart, and eventually died prematurely in his late 40s from a heart attack.
Park was bereft and grieved awfully at his death and struggled for along time to regain any joy for life, although she continued working hard at her craft as a matter of financial necessity.
By and by, she lived for a period on Norfolk Island, where she wrote Swords and Crowns and Rings, which won the Miles Franklin Award, and which is my favourite of her novels.
In an attempt to help overcome her grief, she became a follower of Zen Buddhism in her later years.
This is a charmingly written, honest and stoic account of a life well-lived, with it generous share of struggles and successes, celebrations and periods of despair.
It is an enjoyable and insightful look into the lives and careers of two devoted and dedicated writers covering the period of the war years, the difficult following period of adjustment and into the latter part of the 20th century.
July 8, 2011
Love this:
"Unlike them she could not snatch a flying word like a butterfly, comprehend it and its ramifications in a flash, pull off its wings and flick it back towards its originator".
This is her autobiography and as beuatifully written as her novels. Came to read this after go to a "Late Great" sessiona at the Wheeler Centre and they read some passages from it. I wanted to read more and know more about this fabulous author.
"Unlike them she could not snatch a flying word like a butterfly, comprehend it and its ramifications in a flash, pull off its wings and flick it back towards its originator".
This is her autobiography and as beuatifully written as her novels. Came to read this after go to a "Late Great" sessiona at the Wheeler Centre and they read some passages from it. I wanted to read more and know more about this fabulous author.
June 12, 2014
I found this a fascinating account of a Sydney lifestyle by a very interesting woman. she makes no bones about the hardships her family endured but also celebrated her life. what an amazing lady, always loved her books, now will read them again. with new insight to the author
August 13, 2015
A wonderful insight into the lives of a couple of writers struggling to survive on the proceeds of their writing and how supportive they were of each other's endeavours. I cannot wait to enjoy some of Ruth Park's fiction now.
August 2, 2011
Her life story series is so well written. It comes across as another story rather than a dry account of her life. Worth a read, some of the history in here is magnificent as well
June 17, 2013
It's fantastic to read about our neighbourhood and learn more about its history. Wonderful book.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews