Fishing in the Styx

 Ruth Park's second volume of autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (great title), picks up where the first left off, after her arrival from New Zealand to Australia in the middle of the Second World War and her marriage to D'Arcy Niland. The two managed to scratch out a living, against everyone's predictions, as full time writers, chiefly by never saying no to a commission and by entering every prize going. Park wrote thousands of radio scripts for children as well as the award-winning novel, The Harp in the South, informed by her own experience living in the slums of Surry Hills. I didn't realise that this book had been so hugely controversial at the time, with Park herself being publicly vilified for daring to write on such a topic. She (probably correctly) deduced that she attracted particular vitriol for being a) female and b) a foreigner. She went on to write many more books over several genres, fiction, non-fiction, children's and young adult.

Park and Niland's struggles are very moving and quite relatable to any working author! Still, they had five children and lived in various houses, occasionally travelling back to New Zealand to visit Park's family, and Park tells a beautiful and mysterious story of a visitation at the moment when her father died. Niland was haunted by a heart complaint which caused his own death at just 50, leaving her a widow with five half-grown children and a weighty burden of grief. Not surprisingly, the rest of her life was shaped by this terrible loss. She never remarried.

Fishing in the Styx is in some ways much sadder to read than A Fence Around the Cuckoo, but it's also the joyous story of a creative couple who never failed to support and encourage each other, even though Niland did do some characteristically male things, like claim the dining table as his work space without considering where Park might do her writing (the answer, predictably, was on her lap). My God, they worked so hard! This book was published in 1993, but Park lived until 2010, when she was 93, after a long, productive and richly lived life.