A Versatile Career: Ruth Park’s Novels in the American Marketplace

Park's attraction to America started early in her life.In the closing pages of A Fence Around the Cuckoo, she recalls her ambitions as a young and aspiring journalist: 'I had no plans for Sydney.My ambitions lay elsewhere, in San Francisco, where by design I had established a cobwebby kind of beachhead by selling numbers of illustrated articles on New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to the Examiner' (267).She imagined cruising from New Zealand across the Pacific on the 'luxury tourist liner, the Mariposa' to begin a new American career.She acted on it by enquiring whether the San Francisco Examiner had any vacancies.The receipt of an affirmative response suggested the possibilities of