Ruth Park (1917–2010)

I will forever remember the moment I first encountered this book. After a particularly mundane school day I plonked myself down in the backseat of our car and prepared for the drive home. However, instead of starting the engine my mother turned around and said, "I've got a small surprise for you. I was at a bookshop today and thought you might enjoy this." She then proceeded to hand me a copy of Playing Beatie Bow. Getting a book as a surprise gift truly made my day, I was almost giddy with anticipation to read it. I was nine years old, and although I liked it, I don't think I really understood it all.

Reading it as an adult I have a completely different appreciation of it.

I found it to be an easy, quick read. The events unfolded much faster given that my grown up brain was able to digest the themes of supernatural time travel, period English language, brothels and complicated emotional feelings much easier.

I still like Abigail and still found Beatie to be a little brat. The story moved at a quick pace and changed enough to keep you interested. I also appreciated the ending despite it's sappiness and that it 'tied everything up neatly'.

Upon re-reading I'm not sure I would give it to a 9 year old to read as it does peek into somewhat adult themes, but then again those themes flew right over my head back then and I loved the book.… (more)

An Australian YA book from the 80's, this was a RL book club read. Though not science-fiction so much as historical time-travel, the book feels akin to the Australian equivalent of A Wrinkle in Time.

Abigail is an unhappy 14 year old, bitter and bratty after her parents' separation. She spends time with her next-door neighbour, Justine, helping her out by taking Justine's two kids to the playground, where the youngest, Natalie, likes to watch the other kids play a game called 'Beatie Bow'; a cross between Bloody Mary and tag. Natalie and Abigail notice another child that only watches, the 'furry girl' that stands in the shadows. One day, Abigail sees the girl and approaches her, then gives chase as the girl runs away. As she runs down the street, she suddenly finds herself in 1873, stuck there until she helps the furry girl, who turns out to be Beatie Bow, and her family figure out how to save the family 'Gift'.

More than a few of my friends here consider this a beloved classic, so imagine my chagrin when I showed up to book club and had to admit I didn't like it. Fortunately, I wasn't alone. The book has a lot going for it: the writing is beautiful, the setting evocative; Park puts you in Sydney in 1873, and let me tell you, it's filthy. Park won the Australian Book of the Year Award in 1981 and it was well deserved.

But...I don't like time travel books, I'm not a fan of the dark edge so prevalent in even Australian YA, and most unfortunate of all, I didn't like a single character in this book. Abigail was a spoiled, whiney, brat; Beattie Bow was too ornery to be considered charming and the rest didn't get enough page time to be anything other that friendly shadows. Abigail's first love was just too trite; I couldn't buy it, it was all too neat and pat (although to be fair, I might have totally bought it when I was 12).

The book is a worthy read, I just wasn't the right audience for it.… (more)

Missus was the last novel of Ruth Park (1917-2010). By this time in 1985, she was calling a spade, a spade.

The old Queen was dead, and King Edward well settled on the throne of England. In far away New South Wales, in the town of Trafalgar, Hugh Darcy and Margaret Kilker were born. There were but a few months between their ages, Hugh being the elder.

Trafalgar was first settled by a veteran of that battle. He used his prize money to go out to New South Wales with a cargo of sheep and horses. He applied for a grant on the well-watered tablelands, and was assigned thirty convicts as slave labourers. It was his fancy to give them Jack Tar uniforms to remind him of his glorious days in Nelson's navy. He called his property Trafalgar, and the four creeks that ran through it Victory, Copenhagen and Nile.

The natives were a trouble at first, believing the sheep to belong to everyone, and much more easily speared than kangaroos. But the master of Trafalgar made short work of them, by inviting them to hang around waiting for white man's titbits, and then feeding them flour cakes primed with strychnine. The survivors did not connect the deaths with the white men; they believed the water had gone bad, as it sometimes did after a dry season. One old woman tried to warn the white people not to drink it, but they did not understand. She went away with the two or three others and that was the end of them. (Opening lines, Chapter One, p.3)

So there it is, an object lesson in how to write respectful Australian historical fiction, penned in 1985 and breathing scorn for the so-casual dispossession and massacre of Australia's Indigenous people. It's not the only time in this book that Park acknowledges Australia's Black history, and if I had my way, every creative writing school would begin by teaching the protocols and then make this short novel a set text for critique. Missus is not a novel about Australia's Black history, but that history IMO is part of the story of almost any historical novel set in Australia.

Missus is the love story of Hugh and Mumma Darcy, those much-loved Depression-era characters from The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man's Orange (1949). There's no disappointment in reading it, but this prequel relies to some extent on affection for these characters because the reader already knows that Margaret marries Hugh, and the rest is padding. So there's not much narrative tension; it's the story of the ne'er do well that Hugh Darcy turns out to be in the other novels. And the story of how passionately Margaret loves him all the same.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/11/29/missus-by-ruth-park/… (more)