Shame in Ruth Park’s Inner Sydney Novels

Introducing inner Sydney and the focus on shameThis essay explores the multi-layered place of shame in Ruth Park's inner Sydney novels.The mid-twentieth-century Sydney inner city forms the background to The Harp in the South (1948; hereafter Harp) and its sequel, Poor Man's Orange (1949; hereafter Orange), both set in Surry Hills at the time they were written.In closing, I turn briefly to Park's 1953 A Power of Roses, which is set in Miller's Point.Here, the Harbour Bridge looms over a short-term lodging and its collection of residents, many of them destitute pensioners living in abject poverty.Historian Alan Mayne shows that a gulf in class experience was central to a late Victorian genre of reportage about conditions in inner Sydney's crowded portside 'slums', which depicted a 'separate world of dirt, disease and immorality' to shocked middle-class readers (192).In fact, many residents of these areas were themselves concerned about and complained of the health effects of poor ventilation, inadequate sanitation, foul odours and the like.By the late nineteenth century, working-class Australian families were moving to the suburbs.Order and health were part of the 'suburban ideal' (Brett 121).However, life in the suburbs remained costly and inconvenient: working families thus remained residents of inner-city locales where they could walk to their place of work, either in factories, on the docks or in local enterprises (Mayne 196).A first wave of slum clearances gained momentum after an 1881 outbreak of smallpox in Surry Hills.This involved condemning and demolishing the most ruinous inner-city buildings without provision of new housing.Overcrowding was thus 'not relieved' but instead 'intensified ', explains Mayne (194).An