‘Don’t be filthy, yer dirty strap!’
Mumma Darcy is distraught. The upstairs boarder, Patrick Diamond, has narrowly avoided having a stroke after her husband, Hughie, flung him bodily into a corner in a drunken argument; and her thirteen-year-old daughter, Dolour, has just stuck her finger wondrously in the basin of blood syphoned from the unconscious man. Aghast, Mumma delivers Dolour a stinging slap across the ear. Collecting herself, she apologises. ‘Ah, Dolour, me darling, I’m sorry’, she says. ‘I shouldn’t have slapped you and you only a little inquisitive child. But I’m upset’ (Park, The Harp in the South 18). But it is not Mr Diamond’s Ulster Protestant tirade, the fight, the blood (both drained and poked) or the soot the kitchen stove has belched all over Mumma’s neatly laid table that has caused her the real distress. It is her language. She has called Patrick Diamond a bastard.
The Harp in the South’s (1948; henceforth The Harp) Mumma Darcy is an Irish Catholic, middle-aged, working-class woman trying to raise her two teenage daughters decently on what’s left of her husband’s pay after he guzzles ‘every shilling’ they have to spare ‘and a lot more besides’ in the Sydney ‘slum’ of Surry Hills (The Harp 139). Slang, uncultured speech, idiom and threats of corporal punishment – both vague and real – are par for the course for the residents of Plymouth Street, where the Darcy family lives at number twelve-and-a-half. Swearing, however, is where Mumma draws the line. Vicious of tongue when distressed, Mumma has nevertheless shocked the family by calling Mr Diamond a ‘bastard’, which she believes is ‘no word for a woman, and no word for a mother’ (18). While subsequent editions render the word in full, the Sydney Morning Herald serialisation as part of The Harp’s 1946 literary prize win and the original 1948 publication depict it as ‘b——d’, indicating its truly transgressive nature for the time. Indeed, one reader complained of such ‘thinly-veiled references to vulgar expressions’ in the novel, which apparently made for ‘very sordid reading’ (‘Readers’ Opinions’). Mumma’s use of ‘bastard’, therefore, is significant – it signals not only her hot-headedness but also her specific social position. Along with her non-standard grammar and use of dialect, Mumma’s speech throughout the novel marks her as a woman of the working class: uneducated, colloquial and familiar with profanity. As Norman Page explains in Speech in the English Novel (1988), speech characteristics are one of the most prominent devices for identifying fictional characters with some recognisable social or regional class (55, 75). It is a device Ruth Park uses to great effect – her use of colourful, idiosyncratic speech for her characters enabled her to delineate a particular kind of people at a particular time in history, in a particular place in the world. For The Harp, this was poor and working-class Irish Australians in the mid-twentieth-century inner-city Sydney ‘slum’ of Surry Hills: the very people Park lived among as a new wife and mother in the early 1940s. Monique Rooney describes this period in Park’s life as ‘the living source of The Harp novels’ (‘Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe’ 3).
In what follows, I compare the vernacular of two of Park’s female characters from Surry Hills – Mumma Darcy and Delie Stock – to explore what it reveals about class and gender in the 1940s Sydney milieu. I have chosen to focus on Mumma and Delie because they represent two very different women of their time in terms of their moral, sexual and religious attitudes, as well as their daily concerns and anxieties, expressed through Park’s use of both direct and indirect speech. On closer inspection, however, there are several shared aspects between the two unlikely women – one a good Catholic mother and the other a criminal brothel madam. In the main, it is their similar speech styles and language peculiar to their class and region that characterise them as working-class women of a Surry Hills neighbourhood. At a granular level, however, the pair demonstrate surprisingly kindred speech habits that do not entirely align with their apparent social and moral differences. My comparison of Mumma and Delie’s speech offers a more precise way to understand their nuanced characterisations, which not only enhances our understanding of Park’s novel but also enriches the representation of mid-twentieth-century working-class Australian women in literature. Additionally, this essay draws attention to Park’s persistent interest – as documented in various of her other writings – in depicting spoken language in writing, particularly through her mastery of dialogue across different genres, including writing for radio. This highlights the inherent contradictions in representing the spoken word through text, as illustrated by the partial censorship of the word ‘bastard’ in the original 1948 edition of The Harp.
From early in her career, Park had expressed her fidelity to depicting life, which involved representing ‘good and bad as they are’. She writes in a 1942 letter to her future husband D’Arcy Niland:
I feel, and I know you do too, that I’m a window of life … I can, when clear enough, be the medium through which others may see. This is the mission of the writer, surely – not to propagandise, which is to subtly twist the simplest things, but to depict good and bad as they are. (Rooney, A Window of Life)
This approach is evident in The Harp, where there is a supposed contrast between the morally ‘good’ Mumma and the ‘bad’ Delie Stock. Depicting Surry Hills life realistically in the novel certainly provoked controversy and consternation from the reading public, but Park was adamant that she merely presented the truth as she found it. As she remarked in a 1947 Sydney Morning Herald interview, she chose to set her debut novel in such a place because while living there, she ‘came to love the people, found humanity there, and felt I had to write about it all’ (‘Novelist Tells’). Paul Genoni reminds us that Park’s own childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand was not one of privilege, particularly throughout the Depression, and it had ‘imbued her with a life-long sympathy for people doing it tough’ (‘Slumming It’ 1). This sympathy is evident in Park’s sensitive and nuanced portrayal of the working-class characters of The Harp, which avoids moral judgement to instead ‘depict good and bad as they are’. Park’s approach to moral issues was deeply human, drawing on a version of Christianity that emphasised compassion and understanding. In a Sydney Morning Herald article published in 1946, Park explained that she considered the people she lived among in Surry Hills simply as ‘fellow human beings’, and therefore worthy of exploration and representation in fiction (‘Author Lived’). As Genoni points out in this issue, Park acknowledges the ‘suburb’s poverty, violence, and appalling living conditions, while stressing that the subject matter of The Harp in the South accurately reflects the generosity and well-meaning humanity of Surry Hills residents’ (‘When the Drums Went Bang’). Park was surprised at the backlash against the novel and defended her choice of subject matter in a later interview: ‘to place a blue pencil mark against one section of society and say “this is not to be written about” seems to me the negation of Christianity’ (‘Novelist Tells’). The poor and the working-class experience would go on to be a topic to which Park would return again and again, including not only The Harp’s sequel Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and prequel Missus (1985) but also A Power of Roses (1953), Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977), for which she won the 1977 Miles Franklin Award, her 1950s novels set in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the 1980 young adult novel Playing Beatie Bow.
As an author, Park excelled at what Page describes as ‘catching the flavour of natural speech’ so ‘admirably expressive of character’ (72, 73). Assisted by her scrupulously kept observational notes of things she saw and overheard, Park renders the dialogue of The Harp’s women with skill – not only ensuring verisimilitude for her characters but also leaving a nuanced considered and enduring account of Australian working-class women’s lives. In this exploration of particularly female experience in literature, Park was among a notable coterie. As Delia Falconer observed, Park ‘wrote at an extraordinary moment in Australian literary history when female authors – including Christina Stead, Florence James and Dymphna Cusack – were pushing our fiction into the intimate territories of women’s lives’ (‘On The Harp’). Similarly, Nicole Moore indicates that Australian social realist novels such as The Harp formed ‘something of a dominant genre’ during the interwar period, and it was women who published the majority of its prominent examples (71). Although male characters are significant in The Harp, Jill Greaves, in her critical study of Park’s major works, argues it is ultimately a novel that ‘focuses largely on the viewpoints, problems, failures and achievements of women’ (27). Park’s dialogue deftly produces the vernacular peculiarities of Mumma and the Surry Hills women with an ear of having lived among them – or, as she describes it, ‘knowing them in the raw’ (‘Author Lived’ 7). In the same article, Park explains that she was so taken with Australian conversation and speech habits upon her arrival in the country that she made a deliberate study of them, particularly in Surry Hills and in the shearing sheds she frequented when Niland was ‘Manpowered’ during the war. Filling copious notebooks in the city and recording the shearers’ speech while sitting on a kerosene tin with her typewriter on her knee, Park concluded that the language she was hearing was derived from a mix of Eastside Cockney and old Irish idiom, and deployed this unique combination to authenticate the speech of her Australian working-class characters.
The judges of the Sydney Morning Herald literary prize for best novel praised The Harp’s depiction of dialect, revealing that the novel was chosen over Jon Cleary’s You Can’t See ‘Round Corners (1947) for its ‘richer variety of characterisation and dialogue as well as a greater emotional range’. ‘The characterisation is full of vitality and colour’, the remarks continue: ‘the dialogue rings authentic. The style, with its Australian idiom and Irish flavouring, is forceful and vivid’ (‘Books of the Week’). Despite some readers’ horror that The Harp’s ‘unadulterated filth’ was being published as ‘representing Australian life’ (Genoni ‘Slumming It’ 4), the novel nevertheless ‘documented an aspect of urban life that readers both at home and abroad recognised’ (Rooney, ‘Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe’ 5). In The Drums Go Bang (1956), Park and Niland’s humorous joint memoir, Park recounts an incident of the novel’s polarised reception. At a lecture she had been invited to give, she describes, ‘there was present a contingent from Surry Hills. When a well-dressed woman from a better suburb stood up and denied that Sydney had such slums, one of the Hills ladies told her to sit down and keep her bigfool mouth shut’ (191).
Beyond Park’s keen observation of life lived in streets, shops and shearing sheds, which contributed to her precise ear for dialogue, was her extensive experience as a writer, including her writing of radio play scripts comprising extensive dialogue. In the second volume of her autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (1993), Park recounts her initial reluctance to write a novel for the Sydney Morning Herald competition, yet she considered her scriptwriting experience instrumental in enabling her to do so:
When I first wrote that book I was not an experienced novelist, but I was experienced in the creation of character, the enlistment of humour, and the use of dialogue rather than talk. What literary strength the novel had came from these things. (140)
Park’s enjoyment of writing the dialogue in The Harp is palpable and contributes significantly to the novel’s literary energy. It is not only fun to read – especially the spirited arguments – but must have been enormous fun to write. One can easily imagine that the ‘rich and luscious phrases, thick with imagery and laden with obscenity’ that Delie Stock conjures in her argument with Father Cooley reflect Park’s own appreciation for the liveliness of the Australian working-class vernacular (The Harp 42).
As Page observes, dialect speech ‘had come to be regarded as a marker of inferior status’ long before the novel emerged, yet it provided what he describes as a ‘ready means’ for authors to efficiently signal a character’s social stratum (55). In The Harp, Park’s use of dialect places her characters squarely in the lower classes. Their mispronunciations, deviations from standard English (such as ‘yer’ instead of ‘you’ and ‘me’ instead of ‘my’) and their use of colloquialisms and slang are habits long associated with working-class speech. Park textually renders her characters’ dialogue in ‘eye dialect’, the use of non-standard spelling to render colloquial language in print. Coupled with language comprising ‘features of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation [that] are widely regarded as common in uneducated speech’ (Page 84), this approach enhances the characters’ working-class credibility and often delivers much of the novel’s humour. This method is particularly evident in the dialogue of Mumma and Delie, whose speech conveys specificities without moral judgement.
The women of Plymouth Street – chiefly Mumma, Roie, Dolour, Grandma, Miss Sheily, and Delie Stock – are easily identifiable by their language, both as individuals with distinct personalities and as a collective living within the ‘slums’ of Surry Hills. The Darcy family, in particular, are recognisable as Irish Australian, reflecting what Genoni describes as an ‘identifiable religious, ethnic, social, political and economic subculture’ ( ‘Ruth Park and Frank Hardy’ 24). Ronan McDonald and Maggie Nolan further remind us that the Catholic, working-class Irish were Australia’s largest and most significant ethnic minority throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (‘Introduction’ 3). Elsewhere in this issue, McDonald and Nolan also highlight that ‘Irishness’ in The Harp often manifests in the characters’ ‘passion and emotional intensity, their verbal facility and imaginative excess, their fondness for alcohol, nostalgia, and nationalism’ (‘Blood and Names’). Individually, the characters’ dialogue mirrors their immediate concerns: for Mumma, it’s the domestic sphere; for teens Dolour and Roie, it’s entertainment and romance; for Grandma, it’s nostalgia; for Miss Sheily, a ferocious attempt at dignity; and for Delie Stock and her ‘girls’, it’s survival on the streets. Generational distinctions are also evident in the women’s speech: Roie and Dolour use less of the working-class Irish idiom and slang, favouring the vernacular of contemporary youth culture, while Grandma’s expressions reveal both her advanced age and her strong Irish identity. Where Roie and Dolour might exclaim ‘crumbs!’ or ‘gee whiz!’ before heading off to a ‘whacko cowboy picture on at the Palace’ (The Harp 25), Grandma’s vocabulary clearly situates her in a different stage of life. Her tussle with Hughie over the Christmas pudding illustrates this well, as she complains about his stinginess with her nip of liquor:
Look at it, look at it, Hugh Darcy. No more than a spoonful, and you call yourself an Irishman. There’s not enough there to warm a kitten. Ah it’ll be a glorious day for me when you’re old and aching and knobbly in every joint, and some tight-fisted jeremiah of a son-in-law deprives you of yer wee sup of brandy. (58)
Speaking of aching joints and brandy while invoking dated insults (the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘jeremiah’ as a ‘woeful complainer’), Grandma is clearly marked as a woman of an older generation – the phrases ‘wee sup’ and ‘kitten’ highlight her Irish origins. Yet, it is this Irishness in her speech that connects the four Darcy women across their generational linguistic differences, particularly when Grandma comes to stay at number twelve-and-a-half:
It was a strange thing how her advent changed the personalities and outlook of those already in the house. Old as she was, Grandma had some exciting element in her; the courage and restlessness which had driven her forth at eighteen to emigrate to the new colony had not left her. Soon Mumma found herself unconsciously giving her speech an Irish twist, and even the girls, brought up as they had been to the quick Irish idiom and wit, discovered that their voices had a new softness and purl. It was as though the real Celticism, not only of blood, but of memory and association, was catching, and the Australian blood, if there was such a thing, was vanishing before the red flood1 of the Irish. (54)
Such Celticism, portrayed most significantly through the women’s dialogue, is strengthened by Grandma’s presence. This influence permeates the Australian-born Roie and Dolour by ‘association’, despite their preference for youthful slang shaped by popular film and radio, and it deepens in Mumma, the familial link between generations. By extension, we can understand Park’s nuanced depiction of this linguistic inheritance in terms of her lived experience of Surry Hills life, drawing on the voices she heard to enrich her novel’s portrayal of working-class women.
Margaret ‘Mumma’ Darcy is chief caretaker of the Plymouth Street household. Mother to Roie and Dolour, she also once had a little boy, Thady, who disappeared at age six, and whose absence has caused a never-ending ‘knot of pain in her breast’ (The Harp 63). A devout Catholic, Mumma often prays and speaks of faith, and gets into vehement ideological arguments with the Protestant Patrick Diamond. Mumma feels safest at home where things are plain and familiar; as such, she is wary of anything different or ‘other’. This can sometimes lead to rigid thinking and bigoted speech, particularly when she discusses women who break the bounds of propriety – such as Miss Sheily’s illegitimate child Johnny – or when she speaks of racial difference, expressing concerns about the new Chinese neighbor, Lick Jimmy, and the Aboriginal man, Charlie Rothe. While some readers might find Mumma Darcy’s language offensive, it is important to understand it within the context of Park’s nuanced characterisation. Her apparent racism is intertwined with her struggles as a lower-class woman. Mumma’s domain is the home, and much of her dialogue revolves around domestic necessities and mothering:
Why don’t you and [Dolour] go down to the Paddy’s market and get me enough vegetables to last for the week? … Here’s five bob I’ve been scrimping from the house money. If you see anything pretty down there, you buy it for yerself, seeing that it’s yer birthday next week, Roie love. (19–20)
Mumma’s dual concerns evidenced here are indicative of the motherly presence she embodies throughout the novel. She keeps track of the budget, prepares meals and remembers birthdays, shouldering the mental load typically required only of mothers. Mumma’s mind is often occupied with ensuring there is ‘enough’ of what they need until the next payday; and it is Mumma who is constantly aware of her ceaseless duty.
Mumma’s religiosity is a significant aspect of her character, shaped in part by Park’s own early Catholicism and, as Genoni argues, by her experience with the traditional communities of the Irish Catholic urban poor (‘Ruth Park and Frank Hardy’ 26). Mumma is loud and outspoken about God and the church, yet these themes also permeate her personal moments, where she frequently appeals to the heavens for support. When Roie marries Charlie Rothe at the end of the novel, for example, Mumma’s own experience as a woman, a wife and a mother leads her to offer up a plea on behalf of her daughter:
‘It’s so hard, darling,’ cried her heart. ‘Not now, when there’s love between you, but later on, when you’ve got children, and them with the croup and you up all night with your back broken, and your mind crazy with no sleep, and your husband snoring on the bed with his boots on, as drunk as a lord. ‘Oh, God, dear,’ cried her heart. ‘Make it easy for my little Roie’. (The Harp 194)
Mumma’s struggles as a working-class woman have been profound, as evidenced here, and she wants a better life for Roie. Where Mumma must contend with backbreaking domestic duties, sick children and a drunken husband blithely ignorant of her suffering, she believes that God can provide a less troubled passage for her children if she just offers up her fears to him. To Mumma’s mind, there is no other way Roie and Dolour could access a more comfortable life than the one she has led in Surry Hills. It is rare Mumma speaks such anxieties aloud, however, as she is often disoriented by such deep emotion. Anguish, embarrassment and shame often manifest as anger, and Mumma’s words turn caustic. Mumma thinks of herself as a good Catholic woman, civiliser of the home, but her hot-blooded outbursts often destabilise this saintly maternal image. Despite her best efforts, Mumma’s quick temper and even quicker tongue often transgress her high moral standards. Particularly vexing is when the extent of her family’s hardship is visible to others, as evidenced by her distress when the nuns from St Brandan’s church pay a surprise call to visit the ill Roie: ‘not today? Not today when the house is in a frightful mess and me hair hasn’t even been done yet’ (127). She warns Patrick Diamond to keep his Protestant opinions to himself for fear of embarrassing her: ‘one yip outa you about Popish mummery, and so help me God I’ll ram yer false teeth down yer orange throat’, she threatens (129). Mumma’s humiliated irritation always finds release in her sharp tongue, usually in the direction of the hapless Hughie. Inheriting her often comic brashness from her Irish mother, the ‘delightful and scandalous’ old Grandma, Mumma’s lexicon of choice expressions is legion (141).
Though adept at camouflaging her own suffering, Mumma is nevertheless generous with words of solace when she sees others upset, often accompanied with tea and toast. She is one of the ‘elementally maternal figures, synonymous with comfort, generosity, caring and selflessness’ to which working-class women characters are often restricted, as Cranny-Francis outlines in The Body in the Text (1995, 67). Arguing that the construction of working-class femininity is often linked ‘specifically with either illicit sex or maternity’ in fiction, Cranny-Francis also articulates the mother’s counterpart: the potentially corrupted and corrupting ‘sexually deviant’ woman (67). To apply this framework to the women in The Harp, we would look to the characterisation of Mumma’s role as opposed to Delie Stock’s. As Moore points out, Cranny-Francis draws on Lynette Finch’s work on the ‘Classing Gaze’, where Finch argues that concepts of sexuality and the working class are inextricably intertwined, each one feeding into and overlapping with the other (75). Invoking Anne Summers’ foundational analysis of the binary roles of women in colonial Australian society, Moore describes Mumma as ‘one of God’s Police’, a holy representative of the home. In contrast, we can certainly position Delie Stock as the antithetical ‘Damned Whore’, whose distinct speech patterns not only underscore her moral and social divergence from Mumma but also reveal their underlying similarities (Moore 78; Summers 21).
Appearing in only a handful of scenes, Delie Stock – brothel madam, sly grog runner and notorious criminal – nevertheless stamps her presence across the pages of The Harp as she does among the streets of Surry Hills. Loosely based on mid-century Sydney organised crime boss Kate Leigh, Delie Stock’s most notable (and character-defining) appearance is a visit to Sister Theophilus at St Brandan’s school. Delie Stock comes to offer a donation of a summer beachside picnic to the disadvantaged children – to ‘give ‘em a bit of fun’ (The Harp 38):
The whole shebang. Hire a bus. Two buses. Ice-cream, plenty of tucker. Beach and everythink. And maybe we can get a magician bloke to give ‘em the works. How many kids in this school, Sister Theoctopus? (38)
This amusing mispronunciation of Sister Theophilus’s name, along with the non-standard ‘k’ at the end of the word ‘everything’, and the slang words ‘tucker’ and ‘bloke’ help the reader to position Delie Stock alongside Mumma as a fellow member of the Australian underclass. This is only one of the similarities between their speech habits that link them closer together than the God’s Police/Damned Whore dichotomy might suggest. As Mumma’s often unladylike language betrays the virtuous status her motherhood affords her, Delie defies the boundaries of her tough prostitute stereotype by occasionally revealing her underlying vulnerability and goodness. Initially, her exchange with Father Cooley, who is refusing her offer of a picnic for the children, aligns with her street smart cast:
‘Ha!’ she yelled. ‘So you’re going to diddle those poor little b——s2 in there out of a bit of fun, are yer? Just because you’re too damned pure and holy to touch my money, that was earned honest. Yeah, yer call yourself a Christian. Do you think God would have done that? Yeah, when Mary Magdalene came along to him, did he tell her to take her precious hair-oil somewhere else? Go on, answer that, you old buffalo’. (42)
In contrast to Mumma, who feels deep shame at her use of the word ‘bastard’, Delie wields it deliberately, with no regard for propriety, in her anger towards Father Cooley. Although she earlier softened it to ‘beggars’ out of respect for Sister Theophilus, her ultimate goodness mirrors that of Mumma (and, indeed, Park) in her belief in Christian principles such as charity and sympathy, which she highlights by pointing out the hypocrisy in the priest’s refusal of her donation. There is a subtle parallel here between Delie and Mary Magdalene, the prostitute who anointed the feet of Jesus. While Jesus accepted this act of love from an impure woman, Father Cooley explicitly rejects Delie’s generosity. The brassiness Delie exhibits in this confrontation is soon contrasted with a reflective monologue as the argument progresses, where she absently clicks the broken clasp of her purse open and shut, reminiscing about the naive days of her youth. We learn that before turning to sex work to survive as a young girl alone on the streets, she was often taken advantage of by local boys. In a quiet, sombre tone, she points out that Father Cooley, with his arch disapproval of her unorthodox means of subsistence, does not know ‘what it’s like being a woman’:
‘Everyone’s got it in for you, even God. Even God’ she repeated sadly. ‘What chance does any woman get around here? Starved and dirty and walked on to the end of your days, that’s all, unless you kick over the traces and make the most of what yer got. I’m as good a woman as anyone else’. (43–44)
Making the most of what she has, Delie frequently engages in acts of unexpected generosity to the community. She may indeed be a brothel madam and dope peddler, but as she reminds Father Cooley, she uses such a position to provide financial assistance to those in need – far more than he himself as a man of the cloth does. She asks, ‘[W]ho comes across with fifty quid when there’s a funeral? When Johnny Sheily got hit with a truck, who gives his ma enough dough to go away for a good holiday to get over it?’ (42). Delie’s acts of thoughtfulness challenge both her criminal characterisation and her own self-perception. As she outlines her plan to Sister Theophilus, she is surprised and pleased at her own magnanimity in offering the schoolchildren such a treat. ‘It was plain that some mystic psychological change was taking place in her mind. She was growing in stature as her charity unfolded itself’, we are told (38). These acts of benevolence can be read as Delie Stock’s way of mothering her community. When she hears of the attack on Roie, her first thought is to give something, to provide – to ensure the family has ‘enough’:
She fished down the baggy front of her dress, and pulled out a greasy little cotton bag … pulled out a couple of notes haphazardly, and stuffed them into Hughie’s resistless paw. ‘Here, you see that kid gets all she needs, Hugh Darcy, and if you’re hard up, come around here and get some more. There’s plenty where that came from’, said Delie Stock, giving herself a spank on the chest … She was so overcome by her own generosity that she almost cried. She was a character, if there ever was one, she reflected: her the worst woman in the Hills, and giving this old goon a hand-out when he needed it most. (120–21)
Alongside her generosity, these contemplative moments contrast with Delie Stock’s fiery dialogue, contributing to her complex, albeit brief, representation in the novel. Despite her moniker, she is far from a stereotype or a mere ‘stock’ character. Delie shares an unexpected similarity with Mumma in her strident self-expression and complex morality, and their shared Surry Hills vernacular consistently binds them together. Indeed, Mumma’s narration of the appearance of one of Delie Stock’s ‘girls’ in Plymouth Street one day would not be out of place in the brothel itself. ‘Lord look down on yer’, she says:
I wonder she’s got the nerve to show her face … not her, the dirty little scrub … Put the coppers on to Delie Stock’s dope peddling, that’s all. Fifty pound they say she got out of it. Delie managed to get out of it, but she’ll be after Molly with an axe. (97)
The reference to dope peddling reveals Mumma’s knowledge of local illicit practices, and her designating Chocolate Molly as a ‘dirty little scrub’ puts a dent in the ‘good Catholic mother’ image that might be expected of her. The unsettling of the God’s Police/Damned Whore dichotomy among these working-class women characters frequently occurs when Mumma and Delie Stock experience intense emotion. While Mumma often masks her deep sensitivities with harsh and hurtful language, Delie expresses hers with earnestness and sincerity. Her heartfelt admission to Father Cooley of her womanly suffering, and her overwhelming emotion when giving Hughie money for Roie, are just two examples.
This perhaps unexpected alignment between Mumma and Delie Stock is further accentuated by their shared distance from the more formal language of The Harp’s omniscient narrator. Alexander Beecroft describes this as the narrator speaking ‘almost exclusively in the standard literary form’, which differs from the dialogue represented in a register more suited to the characters (411). Additionally, The Harp’s narrator has a distinctly lyrical narrative style at variance with the dialect of the Surry Hills women. A notable example is the unexpectedly poetic description of Delie Stock’s ‘tainted dough’ tipped out haphazardly on the St Brandan’s school bench: ‘There were dirty, crumpled green notes, and smooth blue linen ones, and lavender ones which had faded to tobacco-stained lilac. They fell in a rustling heap which the wind riffled and teased’ (39). Mumma and Delie Stock would certainly consider such language ‘alien’ to their sensibilities, as Beecroft describes, even if they could appreciate its charm (411). Despite Park’s reliance on depicting dialogue as she heard it while living in Surry Hills, her novel is built on a narrative structure that emphasises the written form over simple transcription of dialogue, attesting to Park’s literary sensibilities as a writer.
In The Harp, Park set out to ‘tell about these people as if they were real human beings’ from her position as the ‘window of life’ creating a ‘medium’ – something in between lived experience and fictional creation (Fishing 140). Park’s lively rendering of the language she heard in Surry Hills into the dialect of her working-class characters, including Mumma and Delie Stock, helped humanise them, providing complexity and nuance in what could potentially have been superficial representations of twentieth-century Australian working-class women’s experience. (Fishing 140). Park was insistent that her intervention in the creation of The Harp’s characters was minimal, however, and that she was simply providing a literary aperture through which readers might see. In her author interview as part of the literary prize win, Park wrote:
Although I have tried in my book to depict these people as nearly true to life as they are, I have, I believe, done little more than to photograph composite types. And any pity the reader may feel for them will be excited by the fidelity of the picture, not by any word magic added by me. (‘Author Lived’)
While I quibble with Park’s final thought – I believe that her unique brand of ‘word magic’ has significantly contributed to the lasting attention and affection her characters have garnered – I fully agree that she strove to represent the working-class women of Surry Hills as she truly found them. Moreover, by highlighting the importance of dialogue in Park’s other works and contrasting the standard English of The Harp’s narrator with the vernacular of her characters, my essay has underscored the vital role of lifelike speech in a novel that is, after all, a work of fiction. Crafted with Park’s remarkable artistry, the fictional women of The Harp in the South remain deeply memorable.