When the Drums Went Bang: Ruth Park’s ‘Truth in There Somewhere’

Park achieved a late career milestone with her back-to-back memoirs, A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992) and Fishing in the Styx (1993).They found favour with both reviewers and readers and were recognised as important summations of a long life and productive career. 1 After completing these two volumes, the only major undertaking that remained for Park was working with Rafe Champion on Home Before Dark (1995), the biography of Australian boxer Les Darcy, which had been left incomplete by her late husband, D'Arcy Niland.In what then became a protracted period of generally sparse scholarship regarding Park, it was these memoirs that attracted critical attention.Firstly, Jill Greaves (1996) provided a reading of Fence and Fishing that focused on Park's self-identification and self-representation as a story-teller -someone who was compelled from an early age to mediate her experience of the world through writing stories.Greaves argued that in Park's late-life memoirs it was her grasp of the literary underpinnings of story-telling that produced highly effective lifewriting.She concluded that Park's memoirs demonstrated she was 'aware of the reconstructive nature of recollection' (246) and produced a form of 'autobiography that exploits the gamut of fictional techniques' (252).Secondly, Anne-Marie Priest (2018) considered Fence and Fishing, together with Park's earlier memoir The Drums Go Bang (1956, co-authored by D'Arcy 1 Fence won the Age non-fiction Book of the Year,