Life at Its Most Free

I can’t speak for other Australian writers, but my experience of being one has been a long process of adjustment to local conditions. I’ve been in print since 1990. First, the flush of youthful excitement – being published. The ensuing years of believing that people might know my name, my work. Thinking I must be on my way. The cruel disillusionment of trying to write a second novel. Chucking that one, starting another, finishing it. Seeing the novel published, enjoying the good reviews, trying to forget the bad ones. My third novel was displayed for a week in the window of my local bookseller, causing my cousin, a wealthy entrepreneur, to say, ‘Tigs, you must be making out like a bandit!’ Sure, if a bandit is paid $5,000 for three years’ work. 

Every so often people introduce me at writers’ festivals as having been shortlisted for ‘countless awards’. I can count them. And I do. But let me be clear: I’ve never actually won anything except the shared Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist Award, which, by the way, didn’t come with cash in 2002. These days I’m described as ‘a writer’s writer’. In fact one journalist described me as a ‘writer’s writer’s writer’ – a bizarre, and let’s face it, hilarious insult.  

Sometime after the SMH No Money Award my practice started to fragment. I’d thought for years that I was a novelist, but novel writing had begun to induce in me an almost frantic boredom. I kept writing novels and then throwing them away. It took me a while to understand that this was because I was being obedient to an idea; as I’d set myself up as a novelist, that was what I had to be.  

I began to write short stories and long-form criticism, neither of which is attractive to publishers. I began to let go of the idea that I might be ‘successful’. I began to use a lifetime of deep reading as the source of my work, and I started to read more deeply myself. I began to understand that books like Moby-Dick or Swann’s Way were written not in a planned attempt to subvert the novel, but because the writer couldn’t write anything else; because they couldn’t help it. That being helplessly disobedient was the thing, and should always be the thing.  

I still wanted to get better. And I also wanted (and still want) to be seen to get better, to be read, to be shortlisted for countless awards – the ambition didn’t go away. But I had adjusted, given up the pursuit of the perfectly formed book and my imagined arc of success. I was now in pursuit of something that wouldn’t know its form until it was finished.  

In March 2019, which now feels like another country, I had a piece of writing published in The Guardian. It was an introduction to the second volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography, Fishing in the Styx, republished by Text. A few readers wrote to me to say how important Park’s writing had been to them. And a week or so after its publication, my agent rang to tell me that we’d had ‘a very exciting offer’. 

The offer was this: a publisher at a large Australian firm had read the article and some of my other work – essays on childbirth, on reading, on death – and decided that I would be the perfect person to write Ruth Park’s biography. 

Every so often friends and acquaintances make suggestions like this to me – practical, commercial suggestions. I usually feel sick about them. Write a best-selling book is always the core message. I have two silent responses to that: first, how do you know I can actually do that? And another, inchoate when I was young, but clear now: writing is, as Annie Dillard says, ‘life at its most free’, and that is the thing about it worth the most to me. I say a version of this to my students every semester: all we’ve got is the words, so you’d better make them good. Even more importantly, you’d better make them yours. 

I’m not proposing that writers go into battle for every book, every sentence, every word. I know how tiring it is for editors and publishers when writers do this, and I also know that as far as the market goes, the editors and publishers are often right. But don’t censor yourself at the source, at the point where you are most free. While you’re writing, forget what’s popular, forget what the market wants. In the end, the market doesn’t know what it wants until a very good book turns up; after that there’s a period where all it wants is books the same as the very good book – until someone writes a different very good book and the cycle starts again. In the end, a writer’s job is to invent the market. 

Being invited to write Ruth Park’s biography didn’t make me feel sick. Instead I felt curious, inspired. My agent suggested that the book might be a turning point in my career. Maybe writing this book would be a magical merging of the old and new me. Maybe I was being rewarded for my Zen approach to the work. I’d taught myself to look away from the target of fame, of actual money, of applause – taught myself to loose my arrow thinking only of the arrow. And here was my reward, a target so big I couldn’t possibly miss, aim where I would.  

I instantly conceived of a hybrid work, a glorious failure of a biography that would look at Ruth Park’s life through my own long becoming as a writer and mother. I’d read Park’s work over and over when I was young. I went to three state schools between 1974 and 1986, and her books were in each of their libraries. We weren’t set them for study – it was pretty much wall-to-wall Boy Bards back then – but every reader I knew (at least every female one) had read The Harp in the South, Playing Beatie Bow or Poor Man’s Orange. Park’s comic autobiography, The Drums Go Bang (written with her husband), had been my manual for becoming a writer. And she was a truly significant figure in Australian literature. If I wrote a biography of her, I would attract readers who had never heard of me. I would be able to show them what I could do. The project would be a turning point in my career – but I could still be disobedient. I would still be free. 

Ruth Park was responsible for writing a previously unimagined part of Australia into being, and many of her books, published over six decades, remain in print. Oddly, though, there has never been a complete biography of her. She lived a remarkable life – emigrating from New Zealand at the age of nineteen (already two years deep into a career as a journalist), marrying her penpal, the Australian writer D’Arcy Niland, giving birth to and raising five children while producing nine novels, an astonishing thirty-eight children’s books, and many works of non-fiction. The Drums Go Bang, the memoir Park and Niland wrote together, describes their decision to make all of their money through writing, turning their hands to any genre that presented itself. Early in their marriage, Park and Niland drew up a manifesto for the writing life, calling it the Minor Carta. Its third commandment was: 

Honouring this document, Park wrote not just books but articles, radio plays, poems, and even songs. She ghost-wrote for an elderly journalist who, conquered by his addiction to the bottle, needed help with his job writing ‘sentimental uplifting verses for an interstate syndicate’. With Niland she wrote popular songs, convinced, for a time, that this might be their path to real money. They used a zither to compose melodies and their combined literary imagination to write lyrics, creating ‘such famous failures as Possum, Post a Sentry on Your Heart, First Love and You Frighten Me’. 

They didn’t sell a single song, and concluded, among other things, that Australian songwriters in the mid-twentieth century were a neglected group, that music publishers were only interested in earning their money from records and sheet music originating in Britain or the US. The experience wasn’t wasted – Park and Niland were expert recyclers. They used the tunes in a radio play called The Boy from Boggabilla, which they submitted to the ABC. This was rejected, but months later the ABC got in touch again, and Park and Niland found themselves writing The Bagman Plays, a radio serial that aired on the national broadcaster again and again. This in turn led to Park’s stint as a writer for the program Aunt Carol’s Bedtime Hour, and the presence of the two writers on the airwaves for years to come.  

In her original and illuminating book A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century, Ann-Marie Priest notes that Park was the main breadwinner in the partnership. Niland was more difficult, less flexible than Park – liable to alienate editors and publishers, less willing to shape his work to the demands of Australian publishing. While his output was still varied and prolific, Park’s outstripped his. Priest also notes that Ruth Park was a woman, and this was Australia in the forties and fifties. While Niland contributed more than many men of his era, Park still managed the bulk of the child-rearing and the housework. 

The way Ruth Park managed (or didn’t manage) a life that would have been the death of most people seems the perfect story for the twenty-first century. In the 1950s women’s workforce participation hovered around 20%; today it is over 60%. Every working mother I know has something to say about the satisfactions and the trials of working and raising children. Those of us who are also practising artists – which often means having three jobs: raising children, producing art, and working in some kind of paid employment – have even more to say. I felt perfectly situated to tell Park’s story. 

Contract negotiations were slow, though promising. I wanted to wait till I had all my ducks in a row before I formally approached Park’s family, although I’d begun communicating with Deborah Niland, the youngest of Park’s children, through a mutual acquaintance. She was interested and encouraging but made it clear that any formal approach had to be made to her older siblings, Rory and Anne, who with agent Tim Curnow are Kemalde Pty Ltd, the trust in charge of Park’s work – and archives.  

I wanted the Trust to feel that the project was legitimate, carefully thought out, properly researched, before I made this formal approach. With the contract still unsigned I embarked on two journeys: first, reading my way through Park’s enormous oeuvre; second, familiarising myself with her personal archives, kept in the State Library of NSW. 

The first journey was interesting. Apart from The Drums Go Bang, my favourite of Park’s books had been The Harp in the South and A Power of Roses. So I began with The Harp in the South, Park’s most famous book, first published in 1948 after she won the Sydney Morning Herald’s inaugural literary competition. Controversy raged around it at the time of publication; some readers thought Park had betrayed Sydney by daring to write about its poorest inhabitants. ‘Sydney has been kind to you’, one reader wrote, meaning, how could Park turn on the place in this way? But the book has never been out of print and continues to occupy a place in the Australian imaginary.  

In 2018 the Sydney Theatre Company staged a grand and inventive production of the book and its companion volumes: Missus (a prequel) and Poor Man’s Orange (a sequel). Adapted by the Sydney writer Kate Mulvany, directed by STC Artistic Director Kip Williams, and running in two parts over six hours, The Harp in the South was a huge success. I was present at its opening. The acting was rich and nuanced; the staging was a thrill – a huge skeletal structure represented the terrace house in Surry Hills inhabited by Hughie and Mumma, and their surviving children Roie and Dolour, as well as their lodgers. Some actors were almost continuously on stage, silently going about the business of living in the terrace house while the main part of the action played out. The dialogue was less thrilling, an issue I silently put down to Park’s writing rather than Mulvany’s. I had a telling moment at interval. I ran into an old acquaintance, a well-known Australian writer in his eighties. I asked him what he thought of the production, and his instant response was, ‘Well, the staging is magnificent, but of course the material is rubbish.’ 

These words returned to me as I read my way through The Harp in the South trilogy. I both agree and disagree with them. My notes say, ‘As I’m reading RP I’m becoming more and more bored. The splendid vividness of her work palls after a while.’ However, my notes also say, ‘I realise how vital her work is.’ I meant this in two ways: Park’s writing is vivid, full of energy, but it is also essential to Australian literature, telling stories that had needed to be told, giving voice to the unvoiced. The bold descriptions still have a kind of Kodachrome power, saturated with the rich colours of the past. And Park’s writing about the female body – the pleasures of discovering sex as well as the cruelties and punishments of a deep, corrosive sexism – is still as affecting, and still as important to the young reader. Park’s brutal description of Roie’s backyard abortion is testament to that. 

There are lots of books about Sydney, of course, but Ruth Park’s were the first I’d encountered. In A Power of Roses, Miriam, a fifteen-year-old living with her aged Uncle Puss in the slums of The Rocks, climbs out onto the roof of her row of houses: ‘Instantly the Bridge spoke in her ears, a great sighing and rushing, the complaining voice of labour and power.’ The Harbour Bridge keeps returning in this post-war novel: 

All of Park’s Sydney novels are rich in this kind of description. I can remember being ten or eleven, when reading Park made me feel as though the city I was growing up in was being illuminated, flooded with colour, even more alive than it already was. I was the kind of kid who took a long time to walk anywhere, always interrupted by sensation – the dirty smell of lantana, light on the water of the Parramatta River, the weird clang of the huge Mobil tankers behind our house as they expanded and contracted in the summer heat. Park’s writing only intensified my engagement with these things.  

And latterly, on re-reading these books for the biography, I felt a new kinship with a Sydney older than myself. It made me think of the Sydney of my parents, born in the late 1930s, of the Sydney of my grandparents, born in the same decade as the writer. In The Harp in the South Park writes about sand on the streets of Surry Hills – still carrying on the wind from the dunes of Maroubra and Coogee, dunes that are now built over and invisible except at the water’s edge. It felt as though Park’s work was enabling me to live in a city I’d never been able to see. 

But I need to pause here to tell you that I stopped reading Ruth Park as I left my childhood behind. It wasn’t just the children’s books. It was the books purportedly for adults: novels like The Harp in the South and Swords and Crowns and Rings. My taste changed; by the late 1980s I was reading Toni Morrison and Milan Kundera, Keri Hulme and Janet Frame and Helen Garner. But it wasn’t just taste. When you’re older you want more than social realism and vivid description. You want more than hopeless, drunken, violent men who are loved and forgiven by long-suffering, hard-working wives. There’s a kind of solving emptiness under all Park’s characterisation, which is satisfying when you’re a child but not useful when you’re an adult with a big, complicated life. When I reread Park’s work, I kept being reminded of my writing acquaintance and our snatched conversation as cars rushed by us on Hickson Road: ‘The material is rubbish.’  

He didn’t mean that writing about people in poverty was rubbish, as that early, angry reader seemed to be suggesting (Sydney has been kind to you. Subtext: so don’t show people what’s wrong with it). He meant something more complex. While reviews of the staged version we’d watched were mostly effusive, I agreed with one theatre critic who noted that ‘cliches appear like weeds in the dialogue’. Most of that dialogue, to my ear, came directly from the books. And while for the same critic Park’s working-class characters had ‘no way out’, he also noted that they were ‘coping’. There’s something in that ‘coping’. 

Contemporary reviews of the book itself ranged from the adulatory to the shocked to the sneering, depending on which journal you read. In Southerly, Marjorie Barnard noted the ‘flexibility’ and ‘facility’ of Park’s writing, but also the fact that the rich detail of Surry Hills poverty was ‘balanced by hearts of gold and a happy ending’. The book ‘offers so much to the reader’s sweet tooth that the critic can only wonder if its “realism” is more a decor than a conviction’.  

I had some misgivings about this critical tension when I was preparing to write my biography. I was nervous about becoming unfree, of having to praise Park’s work where I didn’t think praise was deserved. I was worried that my book about her would be marred by signs of visible exertion, of artificial hagiography. 

Perhaps hoping to be rescued from the project, I pointed out to a publishing friend that Park’s books did not seem to know modernism, for instance; while she was writing The Harp in the South, Patrick White was writing The Aunt’s Story, and the same Marjorie Barnard was writing Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow with her collaborator Flora Eldershaw under the pseudonym M. Barnard Eldershaw. My publishing friend came instantly to the defence of Park, even going so far as to send me Bookscan figures comparing Park’s sales with White’s. I’m sure you won’t be surprised: yes, Park’s sales outstrip White’s by a terrifying margin. And if Bookscan is a ladder, I’m on its lowest rung, much, much lower than Patrick White. Who am I to scorn Ruth Park’s work, which remains in print year after year, transformed by successive generations into film and theatre and television? And who the hell is Marjorie Barnard? I hope you know, because she was a remarkable writer. But I bet her Bookscan figures aren’t great. 

So of course – of course – I don’t scorn Ruth Park. However, I was finding, during my re-reading, that once you’ve read one of her books you have in a sense read them all. In the end, Park’s books don’t activate the deeper reader in me. Sometimes in my teaching I’m asked to explain the difference between literary fiction and popular fiction. Occasionally I resort to a grossly exaggerated and elitist simplification, designed to amuse me and horrify my students: literary fiction is better.  I don’t think you’ll argue with me – or perhaps you will – when I say that Toni Morrison’s Beloved is better than The Harp in the South. Both these books won major literary awards. Both deal with women’s experience in a cruel and punitive society, although Park’s women are freer than Sethe, Morrison’s protagonist, an escaped slave who murders her baby rather than letting it fall into the hands of slave-owners. But it isn’t the characters’ relative suffering that makes one book better than the other. It’s the writing. 

Park’s writing is like the best journalism you ever read. She roves like a camera from room to room, street to street in The Harp in the South, pausing to look closely at beautiful things (like a kind nun’s eyes: ‘clear, they were, like a bush pool with sunlight on it’), pausing, too, to give voice to her character’s unexpressed thoughts:  

But the reader never sees or knows anything beyond the page. The prose is clear like a chlorinated pool – blue all the way down, with nothing in its depths. Also, clear, they were? For it seemed to her?  Do we need the romantically reversed syntax of the first phrase, the beautiful singsong of the second? Compare these lines to those that open Beloved: ‘124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.’ Why are Morrison’s lines ‘better’? They are better because Morrison, full of the same fury as the murdered baby, is not interested in explaining – or solving – what she is writing about. 

The final lines of The Harp in the South are spoken by Mumma: ‘I was thinking of how lucky we are’. Mumma doesn’t have a way out of her marriage to a hopeless drunken man – she’s forced to ‘cope’, and this is realism – but this last sentence lets him off the hook. I’m not against messages of hope, but surely this is what Barnard meant by hearts of gold. 

Books that raise problems but don’t necessarily solve them are better than books imprisoned in the straitjacket of the happy ending. Books that make you work for their meaning are better than books that mean nothing more than what they say. As I say to my students, happy for you to disagree with me on this one. 

I take it back: Park’s writing is more than ‘the best journalism you ever read’. Few journalists are as funny, rude, and observant as she could be. Few journalists have her ‘flexibility’ and ‘facility’. I know this because of the book I couldn’t persuade Text to republish in its Australian Classics series: The Drums Go Bang. 

Why don’t we talk about this book anymore? It is outdated, especially in its attitude to non-white characters (let’s call this attitude racist, because racist is what it is), but so are the novels, which remain in print. Written in the tradition of other comic autobiographies like My Family and Other Animals or Monica Dickens’ now-forgotten One Pair of Hands and One Pair of Feet, it’s a book full of precise, joyful language; the writing rockets off the page. It documents the first years of the writers’ marriage – the wedding, the Minor Carta, the close relationship with Beresford, Niland’s brother, the writing and publication of (and the furore about) The Harp in the South. Niland and Park call themselves Evans and Tiger, in a merging of voices so complete as to make this book a small masterpiece. Neither Park nor Niland on their own wrote a book as good as this one. Here they are, earning their money through writing for a True Confessions magazine: 

Trying to figure their way into the romance market, Park and Niland invented a third writer and called her Ellen Donovan. 

The story of Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland has depths in it I can’t plumb. I can’t know every truth of its unfairnesses and difficulties. But if you were a writer, and you were young and apparently invincible, wouldn’t you commit yourself wholeheartedly to the beautiful, mad challenge of their life together? Who could refuse the twin gifts of parenthood and art, who would not throw themselves headlong into a union that was built on a bedrock of respect and equality? One does not get the impression that Niland was an easy man, but his belief in Park and her work was absolute. Compare Ruth Park’s to her mother’s life: she was a seamstress whose husband, afraid of seeming dependent on a woman (even when he’d lost his job and the family was in poverty), would not allow her to go out to work. Christina Park sewed all the family’s clothes, but she never made any money from it.  

Among the few letters by Park accessible to the public is one to a cousin who appears to have had literary ambitions. Her tone to him is kind and careful. She does not encourage him to send more work. But in 1969, two years after Niland’s death, she writes, ‘I am still fairly wounded, missing my playmate in all kinds of ways’. 

Just that word, playmate. What it reveals. 

During lockdown my partner and I went for weekly walks, carefully distanced, with two Blue Mountains friends, one an academic, the other an experimental musician and singer. We had a method of keeping to the rules that allowed us to exercise and catch up in pairs by swapping partners after halfway. This seems mad now, but we were scared enough to obey. 

On one of those walks, a freezing climb up the Narrowneck Plateau, I invited Jane to talk to me about the decision she and her partner were trying to make: should they have children? She was in her late thirties, he in his mid-fifties – they needed to make up their minds. She responded with the frankness that makes her such an excellent companion and fellow artist. It’s like this, she said. I watch my friends with young children. I test myself, I ask myself after they leave – do I yearn for the children? I don’t think I do. Do I feel I’m missing out? I’m not sure – do I? Is this something I should be trying? If I don’t have children, will I be giving up the chance to be a woman in the full expression of her power? 

At the same time, she said, she was using lockdown to sink deeper than she’d ever been able to into composition. And in sinking she’d hit a vein of music hitherto untapped. It just doesn’t stop coming, she said. She felt like something was bursting out from her, blossoming. It was the most excited she’d ever been creatively. So you see, she said, grinning at me, cheeks flushed in the frozen blue air, I’m totally fucked. 

I laughed. I said, in fact, you are totally unfucked. The decision was obvious. Her partner was amenable to having children but didn’t need to go to the wall for it. Jane hadn’t been able to hear in herself that deep call for children that some women’s bodies sound. And she was doing the best work of her life – work that would take years to finish and might last forever. Don’t have children, I said. 

This was what I wanted to write about when I told the story of Ruth Park’s life. I wanted to write about what it’s like to have a call towards having children alongside the call to produce art. I wanted to write about the limits that being a mother imposes on the woman artist; I wanted to write about the limits that being a woman artist imposes on the mother. I wanted to ask Ruth Park’s children what they’d felt about her mothering – I wanted to know what effect her literary productivity had on their lives.  

I also wanted to think about what having five children and earning all your money from writing do to the making of art. How free – and unfree – that life had been. I wanted to know what it was like in 1950s Australia, when Park was bringing up her children, and compare it to what it is like now. I wanted to use my book to say what I was trying to say to Jane: that contemporary women have been caught up in the dangerous tango performed by feminism and neo-liberal capitalism, told that it is possible to have both work and children and not be destroyed by exhaustion. That every contemporary parental partnership – queer or conventional, separated or blended – now contains in it an endless bargaining for time: time for work, time for play, time for the parents, time for the children. I wanted to say in my book what I said to Jane, which is that every decision opens one door but shuts another, and it’s a lie that all of the doors can be open all of the time. 

I had plenty more to say about this; I still do. However. There’s a reason you are reading this essay, and not a biography of Ruth Park. 

In between the re-reading, the taking notes, and the contractual negotiations, two stones remained unturned: the archives in the State Library of NSW, and the Nilands themselves. Park and Niland had five children: Anne, born in 1943, Rory in 1945, Patrick in 1948, and the twins Kilmeny and Deborah Niland, born in 1950. Kilmeny, an artist and writer of children’s books like her twin, died in 2009, of cancer. Anne, Rory, and Deborah still live in Sydney. Park and Niland have eleven grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. 

The State Library provides the interested researcher with an instant overview of a wealth of material on Ruth Park – some deposited by the writer herself, some by family, some by friends, and much about her writing and her life, including several obituaries. Park had close connections to other writers, too: there’s a small treasure trove of material on the New Zealand writer Eve Langley, collected by Park herself. There are literary papers – copies of manuscripts, notes towards work. There are boxes and boxes of material on the fighter Les Darcy, collected by Niland for a biography that ended up being written by Ruth Park and her son-in-law Rafe Champion. Neither an interesting nor a lively book, Home Before Dark (1995) has the sad, tired smell of a passion project, of Park’s devotion to her husband and his tedious, unfinished task. This project was born a hand-me-down, begun by Frank Niland, a father so obsessed with Darcy that he named his son after him.  

I sat with these boxes in the Reading Room at the Library one morning, carefully lifting out the piles of photocopied newspaper clippings, carefully lifting them back in again. I was more interested in the little cache of Langley’s letters, including one written to Park just before Langley gave birth, with this fabulous sentence:  

The rest of the archive is large, impressive. There are other letters – from Niland to Park, from Park to Niland, crossing all the years of their marriage, as travel often parted them; there are even the letters they wrote to each other before they met, as protégés of two farsighted nuns, one in Auckland, the other in Glen Innes, NSW. There are Niland’s notes towards The Drums Go Bang. There are journals, Park’s journals, years of them. And almost everything I have mentioned in this paragraph is restricted. The public cannot view these archives without the permission of Kemalde Pty Ltd until the year 2060 – ‘when no-one who can be hurt by them will be alive’, as Ruth Park herself wrote in a file attached to the collection. In 2060 I will be 91 years old. Or dead. 

Of course – I don’t know why I say of course, but it’s how I was thinking – I believed that when I approached Park’s family to ask them to lift these restrictions they would be glad to hear from me, glad to see me. They too were probably wondering why no-one had offered to write Park’s biography before. Why had all this time been allowed to pass with their mother ignored and uncelebrated? They would be happy to know that her story had fallen into the hands of someone so ready to know her – to know her thoroughly and honestly, generously but judiciously.  

At this stage, contract unsigned but looking pretty solid, I approached the family to ask them if I could look into the restricted archives. I’d spent months writing a proposal for the biography for my publisher; the project was ready to go ahead. I planned to show the complete proposal to the Trust, once they’d said yes. Which of course they would. 

The innocence and the total hubris of my approach don’t trouble me so much now. But when the Trust said no, they did. I remember sitting on the back verandah with my partner, my face pressed into his chest. ‘I don’t feel calm,’ I said into his shirt. ‘I don’t feel calm.’ Those fairly neutral words were the only ones I could find to describe my state of panic. I’m reminded now of the feeling I had when I was told that my second pregnancy had failed. What registered most profoundly – and what took a long time to recover from – was the feeling of disrupted narrative. When you’re pregnant for a second time, you know the path your life is taking. You can plot it almost exactly. When that plot was changed, I spent months in a state of vertigo, my life brought to a dizzying halt by the application of brakes I hadn’t remembered were part of the car. 

After that first knockback I felt able to talk more publicly about a project I’d been keeping secret – for the sake of my publisher, for the sake of my own pride, for the sake of the Niland family. The Nilands now knew that I wanted to write about their mother. They didn’t want me to, but now I felt I could have conversations about the stalled work with other friends in the industry – writers, publishers, editors, librarians, and arts administrators. I’m embarrassed to say that I knew nothing of what seemed to be an open secret: the family were, as Park herself had been, intensely private. They were guarding those restricted archives as Park wanted them to be guarded. I learned that Park had written her autobiographies with the explicit intention of turning away prospective biographers – and that there had been others before me. 

When I’d calmed down – this took weeks – I got up my courage and approached the Trust again, asking if they would read my proposal, if they would let me try again. Tim Curnow, my contact, took this to the family and they said yes. Back in the speeding car, forgetting about the brakes, I told them that it was the texture of Park’s person – what it was like to be with her – that I didn’t think had been represented on the page yet. I thought readers would want to know more about this. I thought, too, that they would want to know not just what she said about herself, but what she said to herself. 

My last contact with the Trust was a long meeting with Curnow, a close friend of Park and now of her children (he is almost exactly the coeval of her oldest child, Rory, to whom he is closest). The family’s willingness to read my proposal seems very odd to me now. I don’t know what they were looking for, or expecting – some version of the biography that would skirt the difficulties present in the restricted archives? Several things that were shared with me during that meeting, perhaps inadvertently, seemed to confirm this. 

After the meeting Curnow took the proposal to the family and their reply was quick but gracious – they appreciated the effort I had put into it, but they had decided that they still did not want and would not authorise a biography, as it was not what Ruth herself would have wanted. They wouldn’t grant access to the restricted archives. This is absolutely their right, and I respect their respect for Ruth’s privacy. I’m pretty sure I would say the same thing in their position.  

For a long time – it’s six years since all this happened – I wanted nothing more to do with the project. The book was unwritable: without proper engagement with Park’s children and her personal archive, any biography of her would be largely speculation, padded by the information you could glean from her two admittedly brilliant autobiographies, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx. I didn’t want to suggest things that might have happened, as so many biographies, stymied by threadbare evidence, seem to do. 

In her 1994 book The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm charts her own relationship with Hughes and his sister Olwyn, Plath’s literary executors after her death in 1963. Extracts from Plath’s journals and notebooks had been published by Hughes, but he had destroyed the poet’s late journals, written in the months leading to her suicide. Malcolm approached Hughes about this, about the lost journals, and about the various, partial biographies of Plath already written. Malcolm is most interested in Bitter Fame by the poet Anne Stevenson. Stevenson had also engaged with the Hughes siblings before writing her book, and acceding to their wishes for a certain privacy, produced a biography which Malcolm describes as full of ‘hushed cautiousness, the solemn weighing of “evidence”, the humble “she must have felt”s and “he probably thought”s’. By contrast, The Silent Woman is horrible, brilliant and riveting, like most of Malcolm’s work.  

The thought of writing a book like Bitter Fame made me feel ill and ashamed. I had resisted signing the most lucrative contract I was ever likely to see. I was still resisting it. During the negotiations it was suggested to me by all interested parties that I write a biography that focused only on the writer’s work, keeping information about the writer herself off the page. This was for me the worst of all worlds – writing a whole book about the books. Entraining thousands of words to say things I didn’t believe, on a subject whose interest to me was fast leaking away. 

It was also suggested that I write a book like Malcolm’s, telling the story of these failed negotiations and those undertaken by other biographers – a book full of speculation, attempting to join some of the dots of my conversation with Tim Curnow. I still wanted the money, and I still wanted to be seen by readers who hadn’t seen me before. But I couldn’t write a book that tried to convince the reader that the refusal of Park’s family to co-operate in a biography – and the reasons behind this – was as interesting as the subject herself. Especially when I didn’t think it.  

I don’t produce things quickly. And like dog years, each book is worth seven or so of a writer’s life. I couldn’t give up those seven years of freedom. 

There is a biography of Park in the works, and it’s being written by a fellow academic, Monique Rooney. A lecturer in English at ANU, Rooney is currently the Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of NSW, researching Park’s life and work for a literary biography of her, the first of its kind. We’ve never met, but we’re not adversaries. We both work in a besieged field, or fields (the university and Australian literature); we are, in a sense, colleagues. 

It seems to me, from reading her essays on Park, that Rooney does have access to the restricted archive. But how much of the complete person will a ‘literary biography’ be able to include? Will this be a biography that tells us why Park wanted her archives restricted until ‘no-one who can be hurt by them will be alive’? Or will this be a book that draws on the archives only insofar as they refer to the books and the writing of them – a whole book about the books only?  

Of course I have thought and still think: why wasn’t I allowed to write the biography? Why did the family and Curnow choose someone else over me? There isn’t any point trying to erase the envious, slighted self. Nor is there any point trying to erase the gleeful self who thinks, I got away. I got to be free. And I’m starting to see just how difficult writing a biography is, how a writer might be driven mad by the possibilities of paths unexplored, facts incorrectly recorded. Writing this essay has been hard enough – I can see how unhinged I might have become writing Ruth Park’s biography, with or without access to the restricted archives. Trying to stay in what Malcolm calls ‘the close attic of partial expression’ is not a straightforward task. 

Here’s the thing about being a writer and a mother: it isn’t easy. What I wanted to tease out when I wrote about Park was why. Contemporary or conventional wisdom might have it that Park’s life was not easy because she was a woman, because it was the 1950s, and because she was earning most of the money and doing most of the housework. This is irrefutably true and goes on being true. But what’s also true is that it isn’t easy because of the woman artist herself. The problem is, for me at least, that children and writing come from the same place. In the days following my first child’s birth I had a vivid sense of my old life fluttering away like the pages of a comic. Everything drawn, two-dimensional. Since then life has become 3D, and now the kids are grown it’s felt as though my writing has too. 

But each vocation, writing and parenting, has made my life much harder. Having both at once, as well as my paid work as a freelance writer and academic, has been exhausting. I thought I could write about this. I wanted to show that no story is simple, that there are no hearts of gold and that everyone is living a complicated inner life. I wanted to write Ruth Park’s biography because I was curious about the ground we shared – and because I wanted money, fame, a place in history, respect – any number of things.  

Instead: life at its most free. Not better, not worse.