Fishing in the Styx is the second volume of Ruth Park’s autobiography, read with great sensitivity by Anna Volska on this audiobook. It is fascinating to listen to the evolution of one of our best-loved writers, writing about living in a 1960s Sydney unrecognisable today.

Ruth Park was born into poverty in about 1923 in New Zealand, and came to have a career in Australia only by chance. She was about to embark from Sydney to take up a job with a newspaper in San Fransisco when all shipping was suspended after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. A fledgling romance with the Australian writer D’Arcy Niland blossomed, and the pair decided that they would make a living as writers, surviving perilously from week to week, juggling finances and writing projects and the children that inevitably came. She writes about their struggle with humour and optimism but the sense that the light went out of her life with D’Arcy’s premature death is tangible.

Although Park is best known for her novels The Harp in the South andSwords and Crowns and Rings which won the Miles Franklin in 1977, she was also a prolific writer of short stories, radio scripts and children’s books – many of which have been made into film and TV series and are still widely read. It was the scripts she wrote for the ABC Children’s programs and its offshoot, the much-loved Muddle-Headed Wombat Series which provided regular income and supported the family for many years. Some of these were written at the ironing board, because D’Arcy had commandeered the desk!

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2010/06/26/fishing-in-the-styx-by-ruth-park-read-by-ann...