THE HARP IN THE SOUTH by Ruth Parks

This is my first of the Australian classics that I had added to my reading list. I am happy I randomly chose this one because besides being a great read, it also played in my new hometown of Sydney.

The Harp in the South was published in 1948, and is actually part of a trilogy that includes A Poor Man's Orange and Missus, the latter one being the pre-story to Harp, the former one the successor story - both actually having been published years later. Having moved to Sydney and the inner city slum of Surry Hills in 1942, Park's setting for her story was realistically based on her observations of life in the area while living there herself.

The novel traces the lives of the Darcy family, a Catholic Irish immigrant family, in the aftermath of WW2. Hugh and Margaret (Mumma) Darcy raise their two daughters, Rowena (Roie) and Dolour amid the brothels, grog shops and run-down boarding houses of Surry Hills, an inner-city suburb of Sydney. While following the Darcy’s over a period of about a year, the book is actually more a series of vignettes rather than a cohesive narrative, as it uses the omnipresent narrator style (like in To Kill a Mockingbird) to recount the activities and feelings of the various colorful characters that inhabit this novel. In that, The Harp in the South is as much a social commentary and brutally honest examination of the times as a novel.

The Darcy's live in 12-1/2 Plymouth Street in a damp, flea-infested row house and are working class battlers struggling to survive. Mumma does the best she can with the little she has while her husband Hughie is more of a resigned dreamer and drinks away much of what he earns (e.g., in a tragic twist, he seemed to have won the lottery jackpot of $5 and started to initimate to his family how all will change, only to realise that a different person with the name of Darcy was the winner).

The sweet and naive older daughter Roie longs for romance and gets pregnant out of wedlock by her first boy friend, loses the child as the victim of a street brawl, but then meets and gets married to her husband, the biracial (Irish-Aborigional) Charlie.  The younger and quick witted daughter Dolour dreams of escape from the slums but is too young to fully understand all that goes on around her.

To supplement their meager income the Darcy’s rent two rooms, one to the irascible Miss Sheily and her illegitimate disabled son, the other to the lonely bachelor Patrick Diamond, a protestant, who baits the family each St Patrick’s Day but wants to convert to Catholicism late in the book.

Midway through the book, they take in Grandma (Mumma's mother), when she needs extra care, a lively character who knows and speaks her own mind and even in her old age likes to drink her brandy. The fake fight between Grandma and Hughie about who will make the family-recipe Christmas desert is a comical highlight. Grandma eventually succumbs to old age and passes away.

Minor characters are their Chinese neighbour-grocer, Mr Lick, the local madam of the largest brothel, who financially assists them in time of need, and the clergy and nun-teachers of the local church and elementary school that they attend on Sundays and that Dolour goes to school to.

As a fellow book review blogger put it well, "The Darcy’s are resigned to the grinding poverty and immune to the violence, finding joy where are able – a New Year’s bonfire, a school trip to the seaside. They face heartbreak with stoicism and though their home is often chaotic, there is plenty of love within it’s peeling walls." Park's novel shows how tough a place Surry Hills was during those years and how little people in those conditions seemed to want,  and knew about the larger world.

The Harp in the South caused a stir when published in 1948 because New South Wales authorities insisted there were no slums in Sydney. However, the state government ended up demolishing the run-down Victorian terraces and moved their residents to housing commission flats. And indeed, the principle street, the plot plays on (12-1/2 Plymouth Street, the Darcy's home) does no longer exist in Surry Hills.

The Australian's chief literary critic, Geordie Williamson, described Park as "Sydney's Dickens - a human Dictaphone when it came to the mean yet vibrant lives of the struggling, striving denizens of Surry Hills". Ruth Park, born in New Zealand, died in December 2010 at the age of 93, a great Australian author and chronicler of Depression-era Australia. I can only highly recommend this book, especially to everyone, who likes a heart-warming story but also is interested in some historical documentary of a by-gone era.