A Fence Around the Cuckoo

Ruth Park's two volume autobiography, A Fence Around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx, has been on my radar for a while -- as with any very popular books, they keep popping up on Brotherhood Books. Is Ruth Park an under-rated author? Unusually, she was extremely successful in three strands of fiction. Her children's books about The Muddleheaded Wombat were huge favourites of my kids (though I never read them myself as a child); her young adult book, Playing Beatie Bow, was possibly the seminal Australian time slip story; and I studied at least one of her adult novels, Poor Man's Orange, in Year 9 at high school (I wonder why they didn't choose the first book about the Darcy family, A Harp in the South? The prequel, Missus, wasn't published until after I'd left school.)

Anyway, to those achievements we can add autobiography, because A Fence Around the Cuckoo is a tremendous piece of writing. It covers Park's childhood in the New Zealand bush, her family's struggles during the Great Depression, and her first jobs in journalism before she emigrated to Australia in 1942. From Park's account, the Depression hit New Zealand slightly less hard than it hit Australia, but it hit hard all the same. It was sobering to read about the same era as Weevils in the Flour from the perspective of one family. The Depression must have left psychological wounds just as deep as the two wars, at least on the poor, and yet it's rarely discussed -- I guess it was less dramatic.

A Fence Around the Cuckoo ends with Park's arrival in Australia, greeted by her pen friend D'arcy Niland, who was to become her husband. I gather Fishing in the Styx picks up where this volume leaves off, and I cannot wait to read it.