About this record

This black-and-white photograph shows well-known New Zealand and Australian author Ruth Park in the early years of her fame. The head and shoulders studio portrait depicts Park in a glamorous pose. The photograph was taken by the Australian News and Information Bureau.

Educational value

• Ruth Park (1922–) is renowned for her writing and for her legacy to Australian culture. Over her distinguished and prolific career she has written more than 50 novels and books, including children's stories, plays, biographies, articles and some works for radio and television. She is most remembered for The Harp in the South, Poor Man's Orange and The Muddle-headed Wombat series.

• While Park is known as an Australian author, she was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and credits her childhood there as formative in her writing. In her autobiography, A Fence around the Cuckoo (1992), she says she was influenced by her solitary childhood, her affection for the New Zealand landscape and her strong affinity for the Maori culture as well as her own Irish and European cultures.

• Park moved to Australia in 1942 and married writer D'Arcy Niland. Together they travelled and worked in the Australian outback in the 1940s where the first of their five children was born. They both determined to make their living as freelance writers and faced constant loneliness and uncertainty of income. Together they wrote about 60,000 words per week across a wide range of genres.

• Returning to Sydney, they lived in the slums of Surry Hills, which was the inspiration for the work that won Park first prize in a Sydney Morning Herald writing competition in 1948. First published in serial form in the newspaper, it eventually became the novel 'The Harp in the South' (1948). Although its focus on slum life made it a controversial winner, it cemented her reputation and she followed it with the sequel Poor Man’s Orange (1949).

• Park continued to write prolifically after Niland's death in 1967 and was honoured with a number of important awards. These include the Miles Franklin Award in 1977 for Swords and Crowns and Rings, Member of the Order of Australia in 1987, the Lloyd O'Neill Magpie Award for services to the Australian Book Industry in 1993 and an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of New South Wales in 1994.

• Park is well known for her children's writing, in particular for her best-selling The Muddle-headed Wombat series and her children's novel about time travel, Playing Beattie Bow. In her early career she worked on the children's pages of an Auckland newspaper. Her children's stories blend fantasy, humour and social realism with a strong narrative. The Muddle-headed Wombat was first broadcast as a radio serial before she turned the series into books.