The Harp in the South Trilogy

 Like most readers, I wasn't very impressed with the first book of the trilogy "Missus", and it doesn't fit with the second and third in style or content. By content I mean the treatment of the characters. In the first book they are treated seriously and examined minutely and in the second Hughie has changed so much for the worse that it's difficult to find the person he was. The same with the young woman who has changed dramatically into "Missus". 

In "The Harp in the South" and "Poor Man's Orange" the focus is on their daughters and their chances of escaping the Sydney slums they live in. We feel for them as Ruth Park takes us to the most intimate details of their experience.

Ruth Park never lets up with her descriptions of the living conditions which are dirty, because there are factories nearby and smoke belches out ceaselessly so there is not much point in cleaning. The personal washing conditions are difficult too. She describes the effect of bed bugs, the constant presence of cockroaches and most horrible of all, rats. And as the story goes on you feel how wrong it is that any people have to live this way. She describes the price of rental property going up and up until the aged have nowhere to live but flophouses which are no better than tents. Food is cheap enough and plentiful, so the people survive and at least Sydney is not very cold in winter. She describes endless pungent smells. 

Warning: the language used to describe people of ethnicities other than Irish is very racist and there is no getting away from the fact that people used to say abusive things about native Australians, Jews and Chinese. (It isn't as though the other nations never said the Irish were dirty, drunken, and lazy.)

I think this book is intended to be an eye-opener. Ruth Park doesn't pull her punches about what Hughie resorts to to get out of his mind, how the baby's clothes are black from the street, and the nappy smells, what the young people do for entertainment, and how it all seems to Dolour who is strong and disapproving due to the influence of Catholic teaching about the significance to God of all we do and the wonderful Sister Theophilus.

Although Dolour missed out on her exams due to the sheer bad luck of getting infections in her eyes (the family is either not given medical care or it is always botched), one feels that there is always hope that she will find happiness and fulfillment. Ruth Park has quite a repetitive style in that she warns you about the beginnings of people's feelings and then revisits them repeatedly to tell you they are growing. 

I really want to give this 5 stars because giving us a good read about these circumstances is such an amazing achievement but I can't because it leaves such a bitter taste - the taste of the poor man's orange.

The Frost and the Fire by Ruth Park

I'm so pleased that you can still get hold of this book. The story is set in the New Zealand goldrush of the 1860s, where veterans of the Californian goldrush mix with the Irish and the Scots, and away off on their own part of the goldfield, the Chinese. It's the wild West, but removed to the South, the landscape is mountainous, rocky and deep-gorged, and the climate is intensely hot in the summer and intensely cold in the winter.

Just as the weather can be extreme, so can the characters: the crowds can get stirred into a mob, the Scots who seem so well rooted even in the thin soil of the mountains may have secret uncontrollable longings, and the Irish are sometimes carried away by their passions into complete madness. This is a story in which people have souls, and suffer the pains of love and loss in epic clarity. When you read a modern story it's entertaining enough but there's no feeling that the story matters as our lives are pretty much like those of battery hens. But here people act out of freedom, greed, emotional need, neighbourliness, adventurousness, and as their consciences square with the tenets of their deepest beliefs. There is scope to be noble.

The story is about Currency MacQueen, the washerwoman's girl, and is told by another girl of her own age: Tatty, the midwife's daughter, and it features prospectors and diggers, fools and wise men, priests and dance-hall girls and a waif of a violinist. Tatty is not the star of her own story, and has to suffer this bravely, and all the characters, with their strengths and weaknesses, are dealt with sympathetically.

In my version (you can get an edited version) there was a paragraph of racism which made me recoil in horror, but I didn't want it eradicated because I know it represented racism as it was, callous and casual, and thank God it is no longer like that.

I don't normally read romantic fiction but this was wonderful escapism. I feel better for having been embroiled in it - so emotional, so large and grand, as the world should be. I wrote before about the vast emotional scope that humans are capable of, and how pitiful it is to be a dumbed-down version. I feel myself to be like this, moved only minimally by sport and shopping, and all our "adventures" involve safety harnesses and little effort.