A Fence Around the Cuckoo

by Ruth Park

An Autobiography

ISBN: 0140173331

COVER: Paperback 13cm x 20cm

PAGES: 294

CONDITION: Good - pages have lightly tanned, scribbled over name on first page.

c1992 7th edition, 1993

WEIGHT: 350g (parcel rate)

"What I am doing, I think, is walking softly behind this child as she creeps down the hallway. Her aunts are in the kitchen, the only warm room in the house, and she is going to eavesdrop ... If I could put my hand on her bony little shoulder, I would feel her trembling" 

This is how Ruth Park begins the first volume of her autobiography, written as vividly as any of her novels, a moving, passionate, often funny account of the people and places which influenced her early years. Her isolated childhood in the rainforests of New Zealand fed her fertile imagination, her convent education encouraged her love of words, and writing and the bitter years of the Depression exposed her to poverty and injustice.

She entered the rough and tumble world of journalism and began a reluctant correspondence with a young Australian writer. In 1942 she left New Zealand for Sydney to meet and marry D’Arcy Niland and to write The Harp in the South, the first of her classic novels.