Bridging Distances: Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953)

The title of Ruth Park’s 1953 novel, A Power of Roses, diverges from such familiar sayings as ‘stop and smell the roses’, ‘no bed of roses’, ‘coming up roses’, or ‘rose among thorns’. What is the ‘power’ ascribed to ‘roses’? Given the narrative’s attention to Irish ancestry and the Irish diaspora, perhaps Park’s title obliquely conjures the mythic ‘black rose’ of Ireland. In W.B. Yeats’s early poetry, the rose signifies both his muse Maud Gonne and Ireland itself. Yeats’s rose is a consolatory symbol, signalling constancy and endurance through historical suffering while summoning the ancient past, binding it into the present.¹ The idea that Park’s title invokes the Yeatsian Irish rose might seem farfetched, except when one considers the context in which the eponymous phrase appears. The phrase belongs to the quintessential Irishman Uncle Puss (Percival McKillop), one of the novel’s two central characters. It arises in conversation with a stranger, a young migrant working on the Sydney Harbour Bridge who, in response to Puss’s questions, says all his family were ‘ … killed in Amsterdam. A long time ago.’ Though the young man’s ancestry is obscure, this detail hints at the devastating reach of the Holocaust into the Netherlands.² Puss ‘heard the loneliness in the young man’s voice. He looked up to see the sadness and it was there, as it was on nearly every migrant face – an indefinable sense of loss and out of placeness’.³ Contending with his own melancholy and fatigue, and in sympathy with the young stranger, Puss says: ‘Ah, it’s a long, hard life, but there’s always something to keep the heart going, boy. Yes, it’s a hard life, but there’s a power of roses’ (157).

The phrase returns once more, at the novel’s end, when the same stranger, the young immigrant worker, relays it to Puss’s grandniece Miriam McKillop. A grief-stricken Miriam has fled the scene of Puss’s death in hospital on Sydney’s North Shore and run downhill onto the deck of the nearby Bridge. Miriam’s encounter with the young man occurs in the very same spot as the latter’s earlier encounter with Puss. Further, the young man is not really a stranger to Miriam, or to the reader, since she has observed him from afar across the course of the novel with the help of her Uncle Puss’s telescope. Completing the story’s arc, this long-anticipated meeting echoes the arc of the Bridge itself. If this seems a romantic cliché, the narrative closes on a figure of emotional power that complicates the happy ending. Miriam agrees that ‘a power of roses’ sounds just like her Uncle Puss. Then follows the narrative’s concluding line: ‘The breath of the Bridge tore the name from her lips and bore it away with a long sad cry’ (217).

I will return to this final, figurative transfer of Miriam’s grief to the Bridge. In what follows, my aim is to register the poetics of the harbour city that emerge in A Power of Roses through the orchestration of scale and perspective. Though the elemental imagery of the open ocean recurs in the narrative, its poetics – and its oscillations in scale – are drawn less from the harbour as waterway than mobilised through the figure of the Bridge.⁴ Joining southern to northern harbour shores from the 1930s onwards, the Bridge became both a material vehicle of Sydney’s urban development and the emblem of its progressive, industrial modernity. In his survey of fictional depictions of the Bridge, Paul Genoni (2012) notes that its powerful emotional pull and evolving cultural meanings are in some measure due to its location in Sydney Cove, the entry point of British invasion in 1788. And so: ‘While the short-term view might see the Bridge as a sign of something that is both modern and permanent, the longer-view will appreciate that the space it occupies is ancient, haunted and evolving’ (1).

Park’s poetics – drawing on scales and perspectives mediated by the Bridge – do not directly invoke Sydney’s colonial history. Yet the Bridge functions in A Power of Roses as both symbol of progressive, energetic and futuristic modernity and as a presence animated by potent, sometimes uncanny feelings. By turns mythical, musical, monstrous and irascible, the Bridge is akin to a tuning device, manifesting the mood of observing characters. Park’s scalar poetics of the Bridge contour her narrative’s affective dimensions and also yield an unsettling ambivalence. In suggesting that Park’s Bridge is a conduit for ambiguity, I refer to Michel de Certeau (1984) for whom the bridge – i.e. any bridge – ‘is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy’ (128). Likewise, in A Power of Roses, insularity is identified but breached, and enclosure registered but superseded. The move from insularity to a wider, freer space does not occur without loss. In terms echoed by de Certeau’s ambiguous ‘bridge’, in A Power of Roses the longed-for moment of joining ushers in irrevocable separation. These layers of significance prompt the question: how do Park’s poetics at once project the marvels of Sydney, her adopted city, and mark the condition of diaspora and loss of the original home? Examining in what follows the relation between Park’s poetics as they mobilise these vivid, sometimes contradictory emotional registers of joyous arrival and grief, I clear a space for a final, speculative claim to the effect that A Power of Roses can itself be read, in light of these affective layers and in view of Park’s own life story, as an exercise in bridging time and space. Ingeborg Van Teeseling (2011) reminds us that Park was an English-speaking migrant to Australia who ‘experienced the homesickness, the alienation and the desperation of the migrant’, sharing this condition with the Irish, Chinese, European and Jewish-European migrants among whom she lived in Surry Hills (‘Literary Migrations’ 107). Among its layered poetics of postwar Sydney we may discern Park’s reflection on the separation and loss, consequent on migration, from her childhood home, a recollection that also carries, telescoped within, the anticipation of future loss.

A Power of Roses is not as well-known as either The Harp in the South (1948) or Poor Man’s Orange (1949) and has attracted scant critical attention.⁵ As the third in Park’s sequence of novels focused on Sydney’s slums, A Power of Roses risked seeming repetitive; indeed it was met with a mix of praise and derision. The Bulletin’s anonymous ‘Red Page’ reviewer called it yet another ‘hovel-novel’ that revels in grimy poverty (‘The New Ruth Park’). This attitude reflects a strand of criticism of Park’s fiction as sentimental and sensational rather than politically serious. First published in 1953, A Power of Roses was serialised, like the preceding Harp novels, in Australian newspapers.⁶ Like the earlier novels, it was subsequently published as a mass-market paperback, by Pan for the British market and by Horwitz for the Australian market. Park (like her husband D’Arcy Niland) willingly agreed to these pulp editions not least because writing was their sole and necessary source of income. As Andrew Nette notes in his account of Horwitz’s republication of works by Australian writers, the pulp paperback market introduced contemporary Australian fiction to a wide range of readers. For Nette (2019), who draws on Paula Rabinowitz’s study of American ‘pulp modernism’, the Horwitz phenomenon highlighted the unstable and ‘porous nature of literary reputation,’ exposing ‘tensions and assumptions underpinning the construction of the literary canon in mid-century Australia’ (5, 19). It seems likely that Park’s negotiation of the literary and the popular won her a devoted and enduring readership yet simultaneously undermined her standing with mid-century gatekeepers of the national literature.

At the same time, Park herself would most likely have disputed the pejorative ascription to her novels of popular qualities like ‘the sensational’ or ‘the sentimental’. Like the earlier Harp novels, A Power of Roses demonstrates Park’s arguably idiosyncratic model of realism. As Monique Rooney explains, Park’s own account suggests that her ‘realism’ consisted in a preparedness to apprehend, rather than shy away from, a truth that ‘combines beauty and squalidity’.⁷ Park’s signature combination of beauty and squalidity (the poetry/poverty conjunction derided by the Bulletin reviewer) draws on the resources of both realism and the sensational. One could describe this as Park’s distinctive mode of realism. As such, it is perhaps the aesthetic correlate of that porosity and instability identified by Nette in relations between the literary and the popular. Criticism of Park’s writing as merely sentimental and/or sensational now appears both dated and spurious, and its legacy has been to foreclose recognition of more complex modalities and layers produced by realism and sensation working together.

In A Power of Roses, the use of scale and perspective in Park’s poetics of urban space is grounded in a kind of realism, in the close observation of actual urban places and local communities. In this novel we are no longer in industrial Surry Hills but in the area now called The Rocks, a setting that recurs in Park’s later fiction, too – notably in Swords and Crowns and Rings (1977) and in her novel for younger readers, Playing Beatie Bow (1980). As historian Grace Karskens observes in her Dictionary of Sydney (2008) entry on ‘The Rocks’, this was not the area’s official name until 1974, and it remains unnamed in A Power of Roses.⁸ At the time Park was writing this novel, in the early 1950s, The Rocks was not the focus for slum clearances of the kind then underway in Surry Hills. The Harp in the South had itself sparked controversy about Surry Hills, feeding grassroots activism that led to the construction of public housing. In the second volume of her autobiography, Fishing in the Styx (1993), Park reflects on the ambivalent outcomes issuing from the State’s program of demolition, including the removal of Surry Hills residents to such distant locations as Green Valley and Mount Druitt (84–85). For corroboration of Harp’s public impact, one need look no further than reportage to the effect that Park was the honoured guest at the official 1953 opening ceremony of the new multi-storey Devonshire Street public housing complex, one block of which was duly named ‘Harp House’ (‘Flats Named at Surry Hills’ 1; also mentioned in Fishing 85).

The timeline and reasons for slum clearances in The Rocks were different, however. The first phase was in the early 1900s in response to an outbreak of bubonic plague, after which the government resumed ownership of the precinct. Government control undoubtedly facilitated the next phase of demolition, in the 1920s, to make way for construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Whole areas of both The Rocks and Millers Point (on the other side of the ridge line) were razed and the peninsula split in two by the Bridge’s huge road and rail transport corridor. In the 1960s, another swathe was demolished to make way for the Cahill Expressway. After this time, into the 1970s and beyond, further development threatened The Rocks’ long-established working-class communities. As Vanessa Berry records in Mirror Sydney (2017), once the harbour’s maritime industry had declined and land values risen, government-owned public housing came under immense pressure for redevelopment (129–130). That A Power of Roses was written in the immediate wake of the Surry Hills housing debate, and in the hiatus between the two major phases of road-and-Bridge-related demolition affecting The Rocks, bears on the perspectival and scalar urban poetics at work in this novel. The context is further illuminated by an observation by Grace Karskens. With completion of the Bridge, notes Karskens, ‘The Rocks was bypassed by traffic and trade, and became a sort of forgotten enclave’. While the ‘forgotten enclave’ could also characterise the inner suburban neighbourhood of the Harp novels, this sense of The Rocks as an enclave that is islanded, bypassed and forgotten by urban modernity endows A Power of Roses with its specific qualities. Further, as the narrative unfolds, the forgotten enclave is breached and disrupted by external, transformative forces. The enclave in Power of Roses, in other words, marked by its juxtaposition with the city-at-large, and its vulnerable proximity to urban transience, flux and change, reflects a significant, transitional moment in Sydney’s urban development.

The enclave forgotten by the adjacent, modernising city generates scalar perspectives, evident in the narrative’s contrast between its densely inhabited interior and more diffuse, expansive exteriors. This is partly manifest in the pathways of characters through private residences and public spaces. Though the novel’s central protagonist is Miriam (alongside her Uncle Puss), A Power of Roses is a multi-character work, stocked with theatrical figures and sensational scenes of violence, abuse and tragedy. Its dark intensities, however, are paired with the resilience and warmth of community. The community of A Power of Roses is gathered under the single roof of a dilapidated, rat-infested, pub-turned-residence several storeys high named Jerusalem, after a ship, not the city. Yet a biblical aura also necessarily clings to ‘Jerusalem’, as it does to the name ‘Miriam’, the biblical figure who helped Moses and Aaron lead the Jews out of Egypt. Evocations of migration, displacement, exile and diaspora form a subtle yet persistent narrative thread. Communal warmth and vitality are coupled with the melancholy of the immigrant long severed from an original family and place of origin.

Like the ship after which it is named, Jerusalem is a porous building, open to the elements, and internally dynamic.⁹ Attic and roof spaces are likened to a crow’s nest. During a storm, the Jerusalem ‘seemed to toss and drive forward on the tossing sea of air, the black breakers of wind, to drive forward on to the sea so that the morning would find them out beyond the Heads with the spume crusting the upper windows as white as snow … ’ (143). Jerusalem’s maritime character is mirrored in its close-knit, multi-ethnic community of mostly first-generation migrants from different parts of the world (it is noteworthy that a ship named ‘Jerusalem’ was the first to bring migrant workers to Sydney, in 1874, under new assisted immigration laws).¹⁰

The enclosure of ‘Jerusalem’, in which separate families from distant places are housed under the one roof, also suggests an inversion associated with the miniature. In her analysis of the ‘model’ or ‘miniature village’, Elizabeth McMahon (2001) notes, among other things, a pattern of inversion in scalar relations between the single house and the village: ‘In the world of adult human scale we enter a village that contains houses; in the world of the miniature it is the house that contains the village’ (80). While McMahon discusses tropes generated by a Tasmanian tourist attraction, similar inversions of scale may be discerned in spatial configurations in A Power of Roses. Characters and things are experienced in close-up in the story, so the aspect of the miniature is not immediately obvious. But when the microcosm of Jerusalem is viewed in its relation to that which is outside, its islanded or dollhouse-like aspect becomes apparent.

Often with Miriam, the narrative plunges into Jerusalem’s thickly inhabited space, travelling up and down the residence and into its various corners and households. Other residents include the tribe of tubercular Simiches; the religious devotee Mr Christmas and his frustrated wife who run the fish shop downstairs; ex-circus performer and fallen woman Mrs Cantavera, whose Italian husband was killed in the stilt accident that also left her son, Dunkie, disabled. Mrs Cantavera’s elderly father, the Scotsman Mr Frazer, cares for Dunkie in separate quarters in the attic. She is also the mother of Baby Cantavera, a neglected and illegitimate child that Miriam loves, endeavours to rescue and longs to keep for herself. There is the Chinese laundryman Mr Monkey devoted to his intellectually disabled, doll-like daughter. Father and daughter, we are told, live ‘in complete happiness’ in Jerusalem’s cellar. Both the vivid intensity of Jerusalem’s interior and its scrambling of scales is exemplified in the modest, homely furnishings in Mr Monkey’s cellar that domesticate its ‘vast cavernous place’, running ‘up into pitch dark grottoes under the foundations of the hotel’ (13). Like Lick Jimmy in the Harp novels, Mr Monkey is a recognisably orientalised figure, as stock as many of the novel’s other ethnic or national types, such as the Irish and Scots. As Alice Pung (2015) observes, Park may here be truthfully ventriloquising the attitudes and outlook of those working- and underclass communities at the centre of her novel (n.p). The deployment of stock types also has a Dickensian vigour that renders personalities colourful and memorable without precluding narrative interest or sympathy. Mr Monkey is sympathetically drawn not only because of his devotion to Anna and but also because of his kindness towards other slum children. Our sympathy for Mr Monkey ultimately licenses his role in the melodrama of vengeance he exacts on fellow resident and bottle-O Cheap Billy Ketchel, a bullying and irredeemably evil figure responsible for the rape and murder of Anna. The success of Mr Monkey’s long-nurtured scheme to bring about Billy’s death by spider has desirable outcomes, liberating the latter’s benighted family and bringing together at last the lonely Mr Frazer with Billy’s long-oppressed mother Rosa Ketchel.

The lives and stories of this motley group are thus dramatically interwoven in the narrative. Park’s knitting of individuals and families into the larger Jerusalem community forms the impression of a village under one roof. This strategy both intensifies the sense of enclosure within Jerusalem, the completeness of its little world, and yields its colourful, sensational variety. This technique also enables suggestive comparisons to form between one group or individual and another. The pairing of the adolescents Miriam and Dunkie (the disabled youth in the attic), for example, plays out bildung-like dynamics of arrest and development. The pairing of Uncle Puss with Mr Frazer highlights their different responses to the indignities of old age and poverty and their dependence on the meagre, means-tested age pension. Unlike the ashamed and humiliated Mr Frazer, Uncle Puss is resilient, impervious to similar buffets, and made buoyant by his bond with Miriam – at least until he is overtaken by old age.

Though a variety of relationships are figured in the novel, the story of Mr Monkey and his Anna points to the way that deep, loyal and loving bonds between fathers and daughters form the moral and affective core of this novel. Since the age of three, Miriam has lived with her great Uncle Puss, who thus functions as her adoptive father, a status that effects a subtle yet significant displacement and that perhaps foreshadows separation. As the story opens Miriam is on the cusp of adolescence, and the narrative follows her growth to maturity. As Jill Greaves notes, Miriam is one in a series of Park’s abandoned, parentless, fiercely resilient young girls hungry for love (56).¹¹ Though Australian-born, Miriam’s fiery personality is aligned in the narrative with an Irish inheritance, with the ‘rapparee blood in her veins, which was never far from the surface … ’ (152). A lively Irishman long separated from his own family, Puss is a charming, gently comic figure, a pensioner prone to serial scamming and humbugging. Fragments of his Irish past return in his idioms, stories and memories, especially of his young sister Con who was shipped as a child to relatives in America, and to whom Puss regularly writes confiding letters, never sent, as he does not know her address. Though Puss stands in the nominal place of the father, his relationship with Miriam is one of mutual care, even mutual dependence. Puss leans on Miriam as much as, if not more than, she upon him. They share a deep, inarticulate affection, and their domestic bickerings are at one point described as ‘their love passages’ –

… a rattle of words which concealed loyalty so great it was never considered; a companionship which had intertwined as tightly as a vine since the long ago day when Uncle Puss had taken charge of her … (27)

Surviving in Jerusalem in shabby rooms on Puss’s age pension, scrounging resourcefully for food, the pair are nonetheless accorded dignity. They are impeccably modest in their habits. At the same time Miriam’s primal attachment to Puss is firmly registered, in her love of his smell, his fur and his ways. Like Mr Monkey and Anna, old man and young girl are bonded in a little co-inhabited world of their own.

Chapter Five begins with a key description: ‘Uncle Puss was a sort of glossary of twenty other old men’ (51). Puss incorporates the gestures and sayings of old ‘gents’, relatives he’d known in Ireland as a child, a repertoire that renders his personality both Irish and theatrical. As Jill Greaves remarks, Puss’s glossary of old men makes him anachronistic, an embodiment of things distant and past. But the glossary also registers the collectivity that both forms and inhabits the individual personality or character. Indeed the description could stand for this narrative’s characteristic mode of operation. Puss is in these terms a meta-character, mirroring the glossary constitutive of Jerusalem, with its many different figures, voices and stories, and at another level the multi-voiced, heteroglossic form of the novel as conceptualised by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981).

The movement between lone or solitary individuals and a collective multiplicity of characters in A Power of Roses parallels the oscillation between scales and perspectives that helps shape its poetics of Sydney. De Certeau famously juxtaposes the panoptic panorama that unfolded from the vantage point of the Twin Towers in New York City with the spatial order experienced – and shaped – by pedestrians at ground level, by crowds moving through city streets. These oscillating perspectives are operative in A Power of Roses with its striking views of Sydney from higher vantage points, and its set pieces at ground level, such as various episodes in which Puss or Miriam respectively navigate crowded or labyrinthine streets. The switching of scales (micro and macro) and perspectives (from above and below) generates a composite image of the city, but one that is never stable. These adjacent spatial orders are at once distinct from each other and entangled. Indeed they are mutually constitutive. The insular community of Jerusalem is on the one hand separate from the public city outside; on the other hand, viewed as a microcosm or miniature, a village under one roof, Jerusalem refracts and replicates the city’s multiplicity.

Just beyond Jerusalem rises the Bridge, a structure that embodies and animates the city at large. As Paul Genoni observes, A Power of Roses is the first novel to fully exploit the Bridge’s symbolic potential. He also notes that, for Miriam at least, the Bridge ‘epitomises a modernised Sydney, offering a promise of the world from which she is excluded, a world of busy-ness, jobs and a transformed future’ (3). But the Bridge, the novel’s master trope, has many moods and guises, and is glimpsed from different angles and perspectives, often mirroring something about or in response to the observer. At one point, its ‘long, irascible yell’ seems the outward manifestation of Puss’s frustration (154). The Bridge possesses sensory, acoustic qualities: from the roar of its traffic shivering the air (216), to its ‘basso harmonies’ as it becomes ‘a vast harp for the storm to play on’ (144).¹² At times it is animal-like, monstrous, and its scale is gigantic. Miriam regularly climbs onto the shingled roof of Jerusalem to view both the city and the Bridge, which ‘filled the sky’:

For there was nothing between Miriam and the Bridge, nothing to break its stupendous outline, or deflect its solemn, terrible roar. She saw the dwindling forest of girders, the arch that was steel but was as grey as rock, humping itself from one shore to another like a giant anaconda. But it was more than a snake, for she saw now the massive Egyptian pillars of the pylons, like the legs of some great beast. It was as though she sat beneath the belly of a crocodile. (10)

It is from the Bridge, and in relation to its scale, that the city is apprehended, albeit in flashes. From the roofline of Jerusalem or from the Bridge itself, the city is alternately toylike and remote; noisy and hard edged; touched by an atmosphere drifting from the continental inland; a fantasy kingdom; mechanised, smoky and industrial – always difficult to grasp as a whole. The Bridge, in other words, organises a poetics of the city through oscillating scales and perspectives – the near and the far, the micro and the macro – or, in Susan Stewart’s terms, the miniature and the gigantic. For Stewart (1993), while the miniature offers a transcendent (though alienated) vision of an encapsulated whole, the viewer’s relation to the gigantic is the opposite: ‘Whereas the miniature represents closure, interiority, the domestic, and the overly cultural, the gigantic represents infinity, exteriority, the public, and the overly natural’ (70). We transcend the miniature, looking on it as though onto a dollhouse, but ‘we are enveloped by the gigantic, surrounded by it, enclosed within its shadow’ (71).

Miriam’s vision of ‘the vastness of things … brought tight against her eyeball’ (11) is achieved through her Uncle Puss’s spyglass, a device symbolising and materialising the narrative mobilisation of fluctuating spatio-temporal scales.¹³ With the telescope Miriam crosses the distance between the enclosure of her present childhood world and the public world of her adult future, emblematised by the Bridge.¹⁴ It’s noteworthy that the spyglass is an heirloom bequeathed to Puss by his seafaring Irish grandfather: ‘a shaft of pockmarked leather; the maker’s name rubbed into a golden smudge; the eyepiece so worn and crinkled it made the gazer feel that his eye was about to be removed from its socket as neatly as an oyster from a shell’ (10). The spyglass is an heirloom wrapped in an heirloom – a long, silken, multicoloured ‘Barcelona’ scarf with shamrocks on the fringe that Puss wears when he crosses the Bridge in his distress, later in the story. Bearing both the mute traces of a long-severed, ancestral past and of a future represented by the young man on the Bridge, the telescope is a magical object. The investment of magical properties in an optical device that transforms scale and perspective recurs in A Fence Around the Cuckoo (1992), the first volume of Park’s autobiography:

My father and I yearned for a magnifying glass, a magical object he often described to me. He said if you looked through it you could see the feathers on a bee’s leg. But such a treasure remained a dream. (9)

It seems no coincidence that the dream of a magical object opening onto a fascinating microcosmic world is one that the young daughter, in Park’s remembering, shares with her father, and as we will see, this also suggests the potency for Park of father-daughter bonds.

In A Power of Roses, Uncle Puss’s telescope is broken by a petulant Dunkie Cantavera just before he departs Jerusalem forever with his opportunistic mother and a fraudulent faith healer. This deprives Miriam of her only means of closing the distance between her present and future life. But the breakage occurs at a pivotal moment. The visit of the faith healer has also unexpectedly ushered Uncle Puss’s long-lost sister Auntie Con into their lives. Bustling, resourceful, modern and American, Con is dedicated to managing and improving those she has decided to help. Disillusioned by her experience working with the fraudster, Con immediately moves in with Uncle Puss and transfers her energies to managing him, and to domesticating, training and winning over a resistant Miriam. Con, in other words, brings modernising disruption, development and change into the enclave. That there is no equivalent to Auntie Con in the Harp novels marks a shift in Park’s third novel of the so-called slums. Indeed Con’s entry is the last and most pronounced of several incursions by outsiders into Jerusalem’s enclosure. For all her interference, however, Con is a woman with her heart in the right place, as Puss repeatedly tries to tell Miriam. Modernising change is therefore coded as ambiguous and disruptive yet necessary, even beneficial, though not without cost. For all her resistance, Miriam finally returns Con’s proffered love, especially after the latter reveals her own vulnerability and desire for safe enclosure, in a key exchange late in the story. This reversal of the positions of aunt and niece – of adult and child – is consistent with Park’s re-ordering of hierarchies as well as scale and perspective.

Used as a verb, ‘to telescope’ means ‘to slide or cause to slide one within another like the cylindrical sections of a hand telescope, or to run together like the sections of a telescope’ (Merriam-Webster). The trope of the telescope with its folding sections – alternately visible and hidden – coheres with the narrative’s perspectival optics, and is suggestive of layers both explicit and implicit. Though A Power of Roses is not an autobiographical fiction, for instance, it may carry, telescoped within, components of the writer’s life and situation. One such element may be the view emanating from Park’s scene of writing, her location in time and place while drafting this novel. In Fishing in the Styx, Park recalls how, at around this time, having used the deposit saved for their own house to buy ‘a rundown cottage’ in Leichhardt for Niland’s parents, Park and Niland leased a large, dilapidated house, the Old Manse, in Neutral Bay, on Sydney’s North Shore. The timing here suggests this was where Park drafted A Power of Roses, though she makes no mention of it in Fishing (she does say she draws on the Old Manse in her 1974 children’s novel Callie’s Castle). In her memoir, Park describes the view of the city looking south from the Manse’s drawing room:

A splendid hexagonal room it was, its noble bay looking out over trees, roofs and harbour, even down upon the deck of the Bridge. For the Old Manse was as high as a watchtower, and must have been even more so when there was still dense bush down to the shores of Neutral Bay, where foreign ships were once anchored until their papers were examined. (176–177)

Then follows a stunning image of the night city:

Surveying the night city from the bay window was like staring into the middle of the galaxy, planetary systems and nebulae, comets and stardust that flowed in uneven spangled streams along the major streets. (177)

The city’s alignment with galactic infinity, the merging of culture with nature, recalls Stewart’s account of the gigantic as that which is overly natural, as exteriority. And the perspective from the Manse, looking down on the deck of the Bridge from the North Shore, presents the opposite view of the Bridge to that which can be seen from Jerusalem, on the southern side, from The Rocks. Both Puss and Miriam cross the Bridge at key moments, venturing to the northern shore. In a fugue state, distressed by a letter from the State Pension authority that uncovers his nefarious, if understandable, attempt to derive a little extra income beyond his pension, Puss wanders through the city and onto the Bridge. Such is his distress that he thinks vaguely of what it must mean, for some people, to choose suicide. It is at this very low point, looking over the parapet to the water below, that he meets the young man who evidently senses the older man’s crisis, and offers the support and comfort of shared experience. When Puss falls ill towards the novel’s end, the ambulance bears him across the Bridge to the hospital on the North Shore, while Con and Miriam follow him there. Crossing the Bridge to the northern side generates an opposite perspective, a movement away from the city centre and from those precincts on the southern shore on which Park’s novels have hitherto dwelt. The view of the city from the harbour’s northern shore is thus legible as retrospective, as an exercise not only looking back through space but across time. Could it be that the retrospective view thus arising in A Power of Roses from the crossing of the Bridge carries both the memory and the anticipation of other crossings – crossings that extend into Park’s personal story of migration?

In Fishing in the Styx, Park tells of her own father’s death. By the mid 1950s Park and Niland had moved from the Old Manse to Balgowlah where they stayed for a longer time. At some point, her father became bedridden and Park returned to Auckland to see him for the last time. She goes on to describe how her father, sometime later, ‘told’ her about his death. Back in Australia, the family heads one afternoon to Freshwater Beach. Park recalls reading a book – strangely enough – about the cultivation of roses. While D’Arcy sleeps, she watches as a tall man clad in old fashioned trunks runs along the beach. The swimmer dives into the waves and disappears into the haze. She scans the ocean for a long time, looking for him, but he does not come back, and she somehow knows from this that her father is dead (207–209). A Power of Roses was written well before these events occurred or were recorded. Yet the narrative’s central (quasi) father-daughter relationship and its final, irrevocable parting resonate uncannily with Park’s subsequent autobiographical recollections. At the very least, A Power of Roses can be read for its proleptic mourning, its imaginative rehearsal of the near-future loss, across the sea, of a beloved father.

In the novel’s ending, the long-anticipated scene of joining is coupled with an absolute, irreversible severance. Miriam’s eventual meeting with the young man, her emergence from the childhood idyll into common, adult, working life, closes the distance at the cost of separation. There is both a joining and a severing for Puss too. On his deathbed, as Miriam and Aunt Con keep watch, ‘the glossary of old men died away, and there he was, the same bones that his mother bore back in the cabin in the dim years, the same face her fingers had felt wet and bloody in the dark when he was a minute old. He was himself at last’ (216). The dis-assembly of Puss’s glossary, of his novelistic personality, reveals the bare human being. The return to this original moment is also a return to the condition of the sacred, prior to the acquisition of personality, prior to the glossary. The newborn baby touched by the long-lost Irish mother telescopes the past into the present, closing vast distances in the very instant of final separation.

Miriam emerges into the modern social realm at the cost of her childhood idyll. If Puss’s death entails a re-joining, a return to original being, the novel’s last line lands, once again, on separation and loss. As Miriam joins the young man, as they speak of Uncle Puss, the Bridge itself, that figure of joining, becomes the animated agent of severing, a breathing animal that tears the name from her lips, bearing it away with its long sad cry. This image yields an extra emotional charge. Park’s migration from Auckland, New Zealand, to Sydney, Australia, her joining with D’Arcy Niland, and the separation from a childhood world this entailed, seems deeply inscribed in this novel, and its poetics of the city.