‘Islands, Islands’: An Archipelagic Reading of Ruth Park’s Fishing in the Styx (1993)

‘Islands, islands. An oneiric vision of islands shimmers before most inward eyes, and none of us quite knows why’ (Fishing 281). With these words, Ruth Park begins Fishing in the Styx (1993; hereafter Fishing), the second volume of her autobiography, which starts after her arrival on the Australian island-continent and concludes after eight years on Norfolk Island, thousands of kilometres from Australia’s eastern coast. Park’s phrase evokes a dreamlike fascination with islands and their mysterious ability to capture our collective imagination. In their introduction to Islands in History and Representation (2003), Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith elaborate on the island’s ethereal presence in literature, suggesting that their seawater boundaries make islands seem tangible and ‘able to be held in the mind’s eye and imagined as places of possibility and promise’ (2). This framework aligns with Park’s portrayal of islands as both geographic and imaginative entities, accessible through the mind’s eye – a concept suggested by her use of half rhymes and rhythmic sounds in the words ‘islands’, ‘eyes’ and ‘why’ (281).

In this essay, I argue that Park intertwines the material and the imagined to give islands a shifting, unstable appearance – an autopoetic quality that reflects her notion of a fluid, self-authoring literary identity. The term ‘autopoetic’ refers to the self-sustaining ability of an organism to generate and maintain itself through the continuous creation of its own components. I explore this idea in relation to Park’s portrayal of self-authorship, both in her depiction of the island and in the unfolding of her own body of work. In turn, ‘material’ encompasses the geographical, lived and historical dimensions of islands, which Park balances with an ‘oneiric vision’ shaped by childhood escapism and colonial ideologies, particularly those surrounding the possession of place, which were prevalent in her time and remain influential today (281). For Park, the island becomes autopoetic – self-creating – in unsettling these associations through an interplay of the material and the imaginative. This reflects her broader notion of fluid, self-authoring identities, both in the islands she depicts and within her own evolving literary practice. These ideas are central to this article’s examination of various texts throughout Park’s oeuvre, including her memoir Fishing, her classic novel The Harp in the South (1948; hereafter The Harp), her young adult fiction My Sister Sif (1986) and her early radio play Early in the Morning (1946). To date, the significance of Park’s island writings has not been fully recognised, though Monique Rooney incisively notes in an unpublished paper that Park ‘registers the allure of life in various Pacific places in a way that opens the possibility of multi-perspectival and multi-scalar understandings of island life’ (‘The People’ 3). Rooney argues that Park represents the island as a landform that shapes the lives of its inhabitants, ‘a way of being that shapes what and how we know’ (10). This perspective informs my exploration of how Park conceptualises islands as both material and imagined spaces, most provocatively in the second part of her memoir.

My reading positions Park’s work within the context of anti-colonial and archipelagic theories of islands that emerged around the time of Fishing in the early 1990s, as noted in the essay’s opening section.¹ These shifts are evident in Park’s opening phrase, ‘islands, islands’ (Fishing 281). The repetition of the plural ‘islands’ suggests that each island is part of a broader archipelago, with Norfolk Island connected to nearby smaller islands like Phillip Island and Nepean Island. Although the distinction between an archipelago and a single island may seem minor, it has significant theoretical implications for aligning Park’s work with anti-colonial reimaginings of island myths. In the same year Park published Fishing, Fijian writer and anthropologist Epeli Hau’ofa released his seminal 1993 essay, ‘The Ocean in Us’, which reimagines the Pacific Islands through an archipelagic perspective, viewing them as a ‘sea of islands’ rather than isolated ‘islands in a far sea’ (41–59). Alongside the works of other Pacific and Caribbean writers such as Kamau Brathwaite and Albert Wendt, Hau’ofa’s essay centres a local Indigenous perspective, challenging the dreamlike (‘oneiric’) view of islands as distant sites to be owned or integrated into colonial, militaristic and capitalist narratives. Similarly, Park’s archipelagic depiction of ‘islands, islands’ (Fishing 281) embraces a plurality of island fantasies, acknowledging diverse cultural imaginings and interpretations rather than a singular, monolithic viewpoint. In the following section, I explore My Sister Sif and Fishing in relation to anti-colonial and anti-nuclear movements in the Pacific to demonstrate Park’s awareness of islands as lived environments shaped by the legacies of militarism and colonialism. I then turn to her earlier depictions of the Australian island-continent in her 1946 radio play ‘Early in the Morning’ and her novel The Harp (1948) to trace these ideas back further in her oeuvre. The essay concludes by examining how Park’s portrayal of Norfolk Island in Fishing serves as a metaphor for the self. Norfolk Island appeals to Park due to its resistance to being easily named or possessed – a quality that reflects the contradictory and multifaceted nature of a writing life. In this way, the island metaphorises a writing self that is not fixed but is instead dynamic and open to transformation.

Reading Park in Anti-Colonial and Archipelagic Turns

Throughout most of her life, Park either resided in or visited various places surrounded by or near the ocean, including Auckland and Te Kūiti on Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island, Stewart Island at the country’s southernmost tip, Australia, Easter Island, Tasmania, Lord Howe Island and Norfolk Island, as well as Britain and Japan. Park writes of being ‘born in that green, snowcapped archipelago called New Zealand, and I'm very glad I was’ (‘Becoming a Writer’). This exposure to islands and archipelagos likely influenced her sensitivity to anti-colonial and anti-nuclear movements in the Pacific region, as depicted in her young adult novel My Sister Sif. Written while Park was living on Norfolk Island (Fishing 288), My Sister Sif is mostly set on a fictional island resembling Rarotonga near the Tonga Islands ‘just above the tropic of Capricorn, lying halfway between the Friendlie and the Cook Islands’ (2), threatened by toxic industrial waste, nuclear testing, ocean warming and other catastrophic impacts of human activity. Long after the events of the novel conclude, the protagonist returns to Rongo to witness ‘the hideous wounds of strip-mining on Big Island, where in years past the developers tore off the forest as a hunter might rip the hide of an animal’ (178). Park’s choice to evoke Rarotonga reflects the collective effort by Pacific Island nations to sign the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty in Rarotonga the previous year, during the 1985 Pacific Islands Forum.² This period saw radical changes in political understandings of Indigenous sovereignty over islands and archipelagos in the Pacific. A year before the publication of Fishing, the Australian High Court’s landmark 1992 Mabo decision recognised the land rights of the Meriam people of Mer Island over the Murray Islands in the Torres Strait. The Mabo decision coincided with the emergence of several international organisations focused on representing the Indigenous land rights of small island states, such as the Association of Small Island Developing States and the International Small Islands Association, both established in 1992 (McMahon 3). In response to these movements, an interdisciplinary research collective of geographers, historians, ecologists and literary scholars formed within the emerging field of island studies.

The field of island studies developed around several influential Pacific and Caribbean writers, such as Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, Albert Wendt and Epeli Hau’ofa, who redefined the ways islands are represented, both in terms of scale and conceptualisation. Elizabeth McMahon notes in Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016) that the primary aim of these theories was to ‘challenge the relegation of islands to an imaginary outside of the economies and narratives of modernity’ (4). In his seminal essay ‘A Sea of Islands’, Hau’ofa distinguishes between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands’ in the following way:

There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’ The first emphasises dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from the centres of power. Focussing in this way stresses the smallness and remoteness of the islands. The second is a more holistic perspective in which things are seen in the totality of their relationships. (5)

Hau’ofa rejects the colonial fantasy of islands as symbols of unity or completion and instead envisions them through ‘the totality of their relationships’. This perspective challenges the traditional metaphors that define islands as utopias, colonial laboratories, penal colonies or – as Guam poet and scholar Craig Santos Perez notes – ‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ (‘Guahan, the Pacific and decolonial poetry’ 22). As Edmond and Smith observe, ‘island-centred theorising’ has been highly influential ‘within disciplines as varied as history, anthropology, geography and literary studies’ (6). Read alongside the emergence of island studies, Park’s work reveals a similar engagement with the duality of the island’s meanings as both material and imagined landmasses.

In My Sister Sif, Park describes an island that has, as Rooney states, ‘exquisitely adapted to watery, earthy, and airy elements of their habitat while being vulnerable to the effects of … man-made disasters that have begun to poison their environment’ (‘The People’ 11). Rooney cites as an example My Sister Sif’s impassioned critique of ‘specific beings that without care or love would poison a whole world. For the earth is a water planet, and the Pacific holds most of that water’ (My Sister Sif 56). Park’s aside, ‘for the earth is a water planet’, appears to step outside the narrative to address young readers, as if gently reminding them of the dynamic relationship between land and sea. This dynamic relationship can be aligned with Gilles Deleuze’s reflections in ‘Deserted Islands’, a key essay often cited in island studies (McMahon 12), where he suggests that such dynamism implies the negation of human existence: ‘humans cannot live, nor live in security, unless they assume that the active struggle between earth and water is over, or at least contained’ (Deleuze 9). While Deleuze views the ‘active struggle between earth and water’ with a fatalistic lens (9), Park’s depiction is less so, reflecting an experiential link to lived experience. In Fishing, she recounts a dreamlike incident of waking in the middle of the night to see ‘light shining through the windows in the depths of a huge green wave, with the house immediately flooded with seawater as the window blew in’ (Fishing 111). Through this depiction of the precariousness of living by the coast, Park vividly illustrates a similar concept to Deleuze’s theoretical example yet avoids negating the human presence in island spaces.

After reflecting on an island’s ‘oneiric’ pull in Fishing (281), Park provides a commentary on several literary works that have shaped the concept of islands throughout colonial history, including Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) (Fishing 281). Reflecting on these titles, Park wonders if an island’s ability to captivate us stems from a ‘desire to get away from the damnable surveillance of adults’ (281), a statement that echoes her own role as a children’s book author. However, Park undermines these associations of island escapism by challenging colonial narratives of possession, asking how islands are ‘towed into fiction as though they are ornamented rafts, with serpentine palms and savages of epicene beauty’ (Fishing 280). Park’s portrayal of colonialism and escapism aligns with McMahon’s argument that Australian and Pacific islands have often been linked with possessive desires, where sites like Tasmania or Norfolk Island were ‘perceived as ideal colonies … and as ideal prisons’ (19). McMahon connects these histories with literary representations of islands from the so-called Age of Discovery, where writers like John Donne, Thomas More and Daniel Defoe ‘created a kind of island ideogram in the collective psyche, one that connects identity, space and desire and which has fuelled colonial acquisition as much as it has provided a mental space of reflection’ (McMahon 5). Park’s metaphoric and material islands suggest a critical dimension integral to McMahon’s concept of ‘the island ideogram’: for Park, the island exists simultaneously as a tangible environment and a dreamlike landscape shaped by colonial legacies. Consequently, Park distinguishes between island metaphors and islands as lived environments, ‘far removed from the utilitarian shape of the real people’ living on ‘limited land’ by the ‘indifferent sea’ (Fishing 280). This integration of perspectives is evident in her descriptions of most islands as ‘rags torn off coasts, crumbs of rock with but a handful of soil in which grows a thornbush’ (281), alongside her ‘oneiric’ vision of ‘islands, islands’, or the unique ‘island light’ in the Auckland of her childhood: ‘lovely, gentle, sifting through gauzes of moisture, miles high’ (101).

The ‘Shrug and Shake’ of Ruth Park’s Island-Continent

Park employs similar island imagery to describe her sea voyage to the island-continent of Australia to meet D’Arcy Niland in 1940, as recounted at the conclusion of the first part of her autobiography, A Fence Around The Cuckoo (1992). She punctuates her arrival with images of ‘endless sandstone cliffs reflecting the sunrise’ and a sky ‘hotter than I had known’ (270). The shimmering heat mirage reflects back at the writer-to-be aboard the ship as if challenging her ability to comprehend the vast landmass. At first glance, Australia’s opacity seems to unsettle the purpose of the autobiography by complicating the clarity of Park’s arrival as a pivotal moment in her literary career. As Rooney notes, Park’s emigration to Australia in 1942 marked a significant transition in her understanding of womanhood, place and authorial identity (‘The People’). It is precisely Australia’s paradoxical status as an island-continent that enables Park’s concept of a fluid and dynamic literary self. Park comments elsewhere that Australia’s status reflects a fundamental principle of identity: ‘I felt that one day this continent would give a shrug and shake all the humans off into the sea. But it would still be its own self. That’s what I call identity’ (‘Becoming A Writer’). These associations take shape as Park recalls that her ears ‘buzzed as they had once done when I was about to experience certainty about something as yet unknown’, a feeling she connects to the phrase ‘Australia Felix’, meaning ‘Southern Luck’ or ‘Southern Happiness’ (Cuckoo 270). Park’s prose then equivocates, reflecting a mediated connection to both the moment and the island-continent, as her love for Australia becomes entwined with her thoughts of her future husband, the Australian D’Arcy Niland: ‘the ancient, indifferent, non-pareil continent that was to become the love of my love’ (270). Park’s observation of the reflected sunrise aligns with her vision of an island as both an imaginative and lived space: Australia is simultaneously a place of ‘certainty’ and the ‘unknown’, a land she would call home, yet always ‘ancient’ and ‘indifferent’.

Park further explores the concept of the island-continent in her writing, using it to challenge and unsettle established notions of national identity and boundaries. Park’s depiction of Australia as an island-continent unsettles the stable national boundaries embedded in the myth of island continentality and protectionism that often characterises Australian literature (McMahon 3). McMahon observes that Australia’s image as an island-continent gives it a paradoxical character, being ‘upside down and inside out’ and ‘containing otherness within itself’ (3). Park arrived into this paradoxical context: Australia is famously celebrated as the world’s only island-continent, a status immortalised in its 1878 national anthem and prime minister Edmund Barton’s Federation address. In Fishing, Park reflects on Australia’s unique island status through the famous beachcomber Edmund Banfield, who spent twenty-five years living on Dunk Island in the Great Barrier Reef and famously declared, ‘O, Delectable isle!’. Park wonders, ‘Can one imagine his passionately crying “O’ delectable continent!” of Australia or any other?’ (281). She then cites another ‘besotted islandman’, the English philosopher and minister Lawrence Pearsall, who, in his novel Among the Idol Makers (1911), refused to consider Australia an island because it ‘was too big, no castaway twelve years old could be expected to manage such a place’ (Fishing 281). Park presents Australia as a continental realisation of island form – a roughly circular, bounded and discrete landmass – experienced in relation to islands, yet, as she notes, an outlier to the canonical trope of the deserted island, given that its vast size means the landmass cannot be encompassed or possessed by the twelve-year-old castaway, resisting the metaphorical logics of discovery and possession.

Park displays an early awareness of the paradoxes of island continentality in her radio play, Early in the Morning. Written after her move to Surry Hills (Fishing 46), the play was first performed on ABC radio in 1946. In Fishing, Park recalls the radio play as being ‘about Abel Tasman, the brutal cattleboat captain who preceded James Cook round and about the Australian coasts’ (46). The play opens with a time-traveling monologue where a narrator invites the listener to look back to the past from the modernised and postcolonial present, imagining the world of the 17th century:

In those days the earth was newly round. Indeed, some of the grandfathers and grandmothers could distinctly remember when the ocean, mermaid-haunted, and often steaming hot, poured off the edge of the planet in a cataract grander than a million Niagaras. People’s blood did not circulate, the moon was made of ice, and every night the stars left their eternal places in order to parade around the earth. And important things were happening too, for in England Charles the First was still attached to his head … It was in fact the 17th century. And in Holland, two seamen wandered (FADE) along Tar Kettle Lane. Their names, Tasman and Jansen. (Early in the Morning 1)

In popular histories, Tasman is famously known as an explorer acting on behalf of the East India Company, who, upon landing in Tasmania after mapping Australia’s eastern coastline, was said to have departed in search of continents rather than more islands (Cameron-Ash). Park depicts Tasman as a blinded figure, unable to reconcile the land he discovers with the classical myth of an imagined southern continent, Terra Australis (Aristotle). Tasman’s blindness is emphasised in the conclusion of the radio play: ‘I had no interest in land which bore none of the signs of the south continent’ (Early in the Morning 24). His repeated use of ‘no’ and ‘none’ reflects the association of the island with negation or non-existence, reinforcing the idea of Australia as a paradoxical island-continent ‘containing otherness within itself’ (McMahon 3). Tasman’s preconceptions are shared by Willem Janszoon (Jansen), who captained the first European landing on the Australian continent in 1606, and Dutch colonial governor Anthony Van Diemen, who convinces the Dutch East India Company that ‘Terra Australis is a real country … See here on the map. Somewhere in the blank blueness of the Pacific lies this mysterious continent’ (Early in the Morning 12). In Park’s play, Van Diemen backs Tasman to lead the expedition. However, as Park represents Tasman, rather than explore the lands he finds (Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and Fiji), the explorer continues his pursuit of Terra Australis, a place that was ‘once almost a reality in his mind’ but is now ‘becoming dim and fantastic’ (23). Upon Tasman’s return to Holland, Van Diemen reprimands him for failing to explore the lands he discovered:

Have you no mind of your own? Columbus was sent to find a route to India, but he did not ignore the continent of America because of that. You were sent to find Terra Australis … but does that mean that you should dismiss any other land discovered with a scrawl of your pen on a chart? (Early in the Morning 23)

Through Van Diemen’s rebuke, Park satirises Tasman’s blindness to the uniqueness of islands as distinct spaces, highlighting his misguided continental obsession. Park repeats this satirical portrayal of Tasman in a revealing exchange between the explorer and his new wife. Tasman, lamenting his place in history, complains to the prophetic Sibylla, ‘A string of coral islands – a few hundred miles of worthless surf-bound coast. Will that make me famous?’ Sibylla responds, ‘Someday people will live on those islands, that coast, Abel’ (28). Park’s depiction of this concluding dialogue exemplifies what Brian Roberts and Michelle Stephens describe as an anti-explorer method, which rejects the notion that the world ‘may be surveyed and hence known via the Euclidean geometry of a latitudinal and longitudinal grid superimposed upon an idealized sphere’ (20). The radio play satirises the explorer as unable to map or perceive the island or its inhabitants, suggesting Park’s early awareness of the gap between insider and outsider perspectives of islands as well as the impact of colonial legacies on islands in relation to Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.

Following the wartime period in which Park wrote Early in the Morning, she fell pregnant and was unable to return to Aotearoa New Zealand to introduce her new husband, D’Arcy Niland, to her family. Left to contemplate ‘the consequences of my confinement’ (Fishing 117), Park reflected on the events and characters of her surroundings in Surry Hills. Park uses the island as a metaphor to describe an already bygone Sydney, which once ‘had thousands of these small, islanded shops, decades since starved out by supermarkets’ (Fishing 127). In the years that followed, Park would famously win the inaugural Sydney Morning Herald Literary Competition in 1946 with The Harp, the first of several successful adult novels. Fishing uses island imagery to punctuate the period in which she wrote and submitted the novel to the competition. Travelling from Sydney to Auckland, Park recalls seeing a series of islands emerge ‘through a rift in the clouds, a dreamlike glimpse of lands – islands very high, fissured, half-dissolved in mist, that shifted along the horizon for a moment and were gone’ (Fishing 97–98). Even as Park can identify the glacial islands as ‘uninhabited Auckland Islands, halfway between the southern toe of New Zealand and the iceberg line, old sealing islands hazardous to shipping’, she notes that they are ‘forever lost in snow and fog’ (98). The image reminds Park of Captain Cook’s travels in the Antarctic Circle, where she had read that ‘a strange silence fell over all the people and one man began to pray aloud’ (98). The hallucinatory glacial archipelago exemplifies the shifting appearance of an island coming in and out of view, in contrast to the blinding permanence of Australia. Both islands, however, ultimately defy the observer’s capacity to hold them in the mind’s eye, either shrugged off or vanished altogether. As with the island-continent, the elusive glacial island underscores an idea of identity that transcends fixed, determinative and possessive thinking.

In Fishing, Park explains that during the time she was writing The Harp, she often wrote letters to Niland, who had decided to explore the southern islands they had observed through the fog. She describes their correspondence as occurring across Aotearoa and the southern islands. Introducing one letter, she traces her husband to ‘Stewart Island, the third large island of New Zealand, which also encompasses more than a thousand small ones’ (140–141). This description – of a large island encompassing smaller ones – moves away from the concept of a monolithic island and towards that of a connected archipelago. It suggests a geographical perspective where a single site or location is understood through its connections to other places, rather than as a discrete, separate entity. In this sense, the evanescent glacial archipelago and its disappearance may have influenced Park’s depiction of Sydney in The Harp and the island-like isolation of the Surry Hills neighbourhood. Fishing opens with Park looking out from her bedroom window onto Devonshire Street, describing it as a ‘close community’ made ‘closer’ by overcrowded ‘narrow streets and spindleshanked lanes’, with ‘Darlinghurst and Paddington’ seen as ‘foreign parts’ (Fishing 4). She later notes that these same streets would later become ‘islanded council estates’ (10). Writing from her own island, Park observed Surry Hills’ closed-off quality as inspiration for The Harp:

There was nothing left but Surry Hills. My life there had been a visit to some antique island where the nineteenth century prevailed. As I pondered its idiosyncratic nature, I began to remember things – lanes with no gutters, just a line of inclined setts in the middle to carry away the rain. (138)

Drawing on her experiences of living in and traveling between the islands of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, Park reimagines Surry Hills as a shifting and unstable socio-geographical terrain, momentarily detached from Sydney and contemporary society, like a passing iceberg.

Legacies of Colonial Dispossession on ‘an Antique Island’

Park’s vision of Surry Hills as ‘an antique island’ is shaped by her awareness of First Nations’ displacement and the legacies of colonial dispossession. Rooney argues that from Park’s early novels, she writes in the ‘manner of a guest’, as if she acknowledges that ‘foreigners to this place had built a threshold built upon a threshold to a home’ (‘Ruth Park’s Charlie Rothe’ n.p.). In her essay, Rooney connects Park’s recognition of First Nations’ resistance in Australia’s pre-colonial history to her characterisation of Rowena’s relationship with Charlie Rothe. Notably, Park uses island motifs in The Harp to depict this cross-cultural romance. When prompted by her mother to explain her love for Charlie, ‘Roie couldn’t find words’, before saying, ‘People going along, each one like an island, quite separate from all the others. Then you meet someone going the same way, and you find that you don’t want to be an island anymore’ (167). Park later describes the two lovers in a Surry Hills that resembles ‘an island lapped by the roaring traffic seas of the great city’ (200). These quotes illustrate the significance of the island as a metaphor for both personal and collective alienation, rooted in an awareness of the colonial legacies of dispossession. Park depicts Surry Hills as a self-contained, insular enclave for Irish Australians and other impoverished immigrants, positioned in relation to similarly unstable, ‘islanded’ suburbs elsewhere. Rowena’s longing to be with Charlie connects the isolated Irish poor in Surry Hills with the isolated Aboriginal communities in La Perouse (where Rothe concludes the trilogy with Angus McIntosh), two suburbs on the city’s fringe.

Island narratives often feature tropes of encounters in liminal spaces between the coloniser and the colonised (Edmond and Smith 5). Park’s portrayal of Surry Hills emphasises the violent legacies of colonialism in a landscape shaped by these cross-cultural interactions. In Fishing, she recounts discovering Cammeraygal carvings beneath and near her home, the Old Manse, in Neutral Bay:

The tail of a sacred snake vanished under the toilet and beneath the house itself, for the golden rock was richly engraved with pictures of whales, hammerhead sharks, wallabies, and lizards. In the concavities of the house … were dim paintings of human beings, one the faded figure of a man with no mouth and a hat shaped like an ice-cream cone. Traces of black and yellow ochre were still discernible. (176)

Park describes finding shallow holes created by grinding stones over millennia and presses her finger into a stone recess, as if touching ‘thumb-holes’ that ‘fitted my own fingers as they had fitted those of the dark-eyed women of ten thousand years before’ (176). This description, while evocative, risks romanticising and essentialising First Nations presence. The moment recalls the time travel narrative of her children’s novel, Playing Beatie Bow (1980), which was also written while Park lived on Norfolk Island (Fishing 288), in which Park does not refer to First Nations peoples. In both cases, an embodied connection to material objects allows imaginative transport to the past, a point Rooney raises in her analysis of the Orkney cloth discovered by Abigail in Playing Beatie Bow (‘Stages of Development’). As Rooney posits, the cloth ‘sets in motion Abigail’s journey of self-discovery and, in doing so, preserves but also necessarily misrepresents, rather than simply claims to stand in for, the past that she uncovers’ (98). In Fishing, this same approach allows Park to access the past while acknowledging the cultural gap between herself and the ‘Aboriginal women’ who used the holes to ‘ground grass seed, wild grain, and nuts’ (176).

Park’s idea that objects – from the Orkney cloth to the ground sandstone – can transport us across time parallels her view of islands as landforms that evoke a return to childhood states, both informed by narratives of escapism and dispossession. In Fishing (281), Park discusses Aotearoa New Zealand – Australian poet Elizabeth Riddell’s 1943 poem, ‘The Old Sailor’, which depicts a sailor’s longing for an island, intertwined with images of labourers (24):

The old sailor dreams of a little island
Rolling like an apple in the wide green sea,
A little island he could hold in his hand
Turn over this way and then that

The sailor’s dream of a handheld island highlights how representations of islands mirror an internalised sense of self. To fulfil his projection, the sailor must grasp the perfectly bounded object – the island – an ultimately unattainable desire that illustrates the unstable relationship between the self and the island-as-object. This desire carries an implicit colonial violence as Riddell encodes the sailor’s island with a racialised figure ‘in a palm-leaf hat’.³ In citing Riddell’s poem, Park may have recognised themes similar to those in her early radio play, Early in the Morning. While the sailor pursues islands and Tasman pursues continents, both figures are blinded by their pursuit of an idealised geography that reflects their sense of self. Notably, both Park and Riddell turned to the theme of islands at various points in their careers. While Park wrote about islands and their Indigenous inhabitants as contemporary settings and subjects in several literary works, such as the children’s books The Shaky Island (1962), The Sixpenny Island (1968), Nuki and the Sea Serpent: a Maori Legend (1969) and Come Danger, Come Darkness (1978), as well as her young adult novel, My Sister Sif (1986), Riddell published her final poetry collection, The Difficult Island, in 1994 at the age of eighty-four. In this collection, Riddell warns of the dangers of island possession with the image of a ‘dollar man’ seeking an ‘unspoiled island’ that was ‘nameless’ (qtd. in Nelson), a haunting absence that contrasts with the racialised figure in ‘The Old Sailor’ yet is replete with an abundant environment: ‘but there were butterflies / four kinds of birds, ten kinds of plants / that fluttered, sang and blossomed nowhere else’ (qtd. in Nelson).

Riddell and Park were writing in parallel with calls by Indigenous scholars to ‘overturn all hegemonic views that aim ultimately to confine us’ (Hau’ofa 39). In this sense, their work is in some ways answerable to the different reading publics that have emerged in relation to islands and literary studies in the decades since. The dangers of romanticism and colonial nostalgia are striking in a literary climate of First Nations writing. Within this context, both Riddell and Park display an awareness of the dangers inherent in possessive island narratives: Riddell critiques the monomania of the ‘money man’, while Park draws on her firsthand experiences to shape her portrayal of islands. Reflecting on her depression following the loss of her husband, Park recalls attending an Islander funeral on Norfolk Island, connecting images of an open grave covered with ‘green sprays of eaves’ and ‘garlands of willow’ (Fishing 268), to songs from Cape Cod and Boston, passed on to the Pitcairn, and the Māori tangis she witnessed as a child. Her experience of the event is thus entangled with others, merging personal grief with collective memory. It is within this memorial arrangement that Park can express her own grief, imagining herself on an island’s underwater slopes, ‘at the bottom of the sea, mile-high water on top of me’ (270). In these descriptions, Park represents the island both as a lived setting and as an ontological mirror to a reader’s desire, while acknowledging that these desires interact with colonial representations of the island as a site of possession.

Fishing in the Styx: Metaphor and Material

A remarkable culmination of Park’s multifaceted representation of islands, Fishing was written after nearly a decade on Norfolk Island. From this vantage point, the autobiographical conclusion reflects on a range of real islands that have influenced her life and work: Auckland and Te Kūiti on Aotearoa New Zealand’s North Island, Stewart Island at the country’s southernmost tip, Australia, Easter Island, Tasmania, Lord Howe Island, Britain and Japan. These islands are frequently depicted through their metaphorical allure for the observer or inhabitant; for instance, Park describes the Pacific Islands as ‘tail-ends of mountain ranges … marching out to sea’ (Fishing 281). The dynamic relationship between imaginative and actual experience informs Park’s decision to move to Norfolk Island. Before her departure, in the ‘days and weeks in the braying, hooting, and yowling city [of Sydney]’, Park admits, ‘I cannot deny that a golden haze of romanticism settled over the idea of islands. I began to yearn for peace, silence, even solitariness’ (Fishing 281–82). Park portrays the romanticised Norfolk Island as an antidote to Sydney’s self-destructiveness, exemplified by the construction around the ‘endless sandstone cliffs reflecting the sunrise’ (Cuckoo 270) she observed upon her arrival to meet Niland in 1940: ‘the terrible sound of the rock pick tirelessly picking away at Sydney’s sandstone foundations’ (Fishing 282). Park’s arrival on Norfolk Island could be seen as a transition as significant as her earlier move to Sydney, given the impact of her husband’s passing and the prolific nature of her literary output while residing on Norfolk: ‘Many things were written in that house, dozens of articles of one sort or another … several Wombat books, and three books for teenagers, including Come Danger, Come Darkness and Playing Beatie Bow’, along with several non-fiction travelogues and her novel Swords and Crowns and Rings (Fishing 288). Park’s passage between islands arguably defines an oeuvre marked by both transformation and continuity from a key perspective in the latter stage of her literary career.

Park’s publications written on Norfolk Island reflect a deep awareness of the island’s complex colonial history, serving as inspiration for her children’s book, Come Danger, Come Darkness (1978), set during the island’s second penal settlement from 1825 to 1855, as well as her later non-fiction guidebook, Norfolk Island and Lord Howe Island (1982). Fishing praises Norfolk’s ability to withstand and resist the demarcations of a romanticised colonial history – like the ‘shrug’ of an island-continent – a framework she outlines in her early expectations of the island’s ‘faded colonial splendours’ and ‘the slow speech of the island women, like waves breaking on a still day’ (285). While Polynesian peoples lived on Norfolk Island from at least 1150 to 1450, the island has the dubious distinction of being the site of the first European settlement in the South Pacific, established just three weeks after the First Fleet’s arrival at Botany Bay (Smith 116). The main population of the island was formed in the late 19th century, after British authorities relocated the Pitcairn Islanders to Norfolk.⁴ Norfolk Island is often perceived as having origins in penal transport and migration rather than in conflict or the appropriation of Indigenous lands. Park emphasises to her readers that the island showed ‘no sign of previous occupation, its forests silent as though in a dream’ (Fishing 285). However, Park’s careful use of the phrase ‘as though’ hints at other colonial impacts on the island’s Indigenous flora and fauna, which she describes as ‘the helpless victim of every imported insect and plant pest’ (286). This inmpact is further reflected in Park’s description of the island as being ‘like a ship, all alone in the ocean, secure, well found, never sunk yet, and its pines were ten thousand masts’ (286). The simile presents the island simultaneously as a figure of discovery – ‘well found’ – an undefeated warship – ‘never sunk yet’ – and as a composite of its environmental parts – ‘its pines were ten thousand masts’.⁵ These multiple meanings unsettle a reader’s capacity to know and therefore possess the island as if ‘an apple in the hand’, a statement that rings true for Park’s description of her own time spent on Norfolk.

Park’s possessive depictions of islands as handheld objects are evident in her descriptions of Norfolk Island, which she calls ‘a little island green as mint and about as big as a handkerchief’ (‘Becoming a Writer’) and in Fishing: ‘Even its shape pleased me, a soft triangle, little and compact’ (285). Park’s likening of islands to gardens, handkerchiefs, triangles, apples and hands aligns to some extent with McMahon’s critique of a writer’s use of the island as a metaphor for ‘a seamless concordance of self, state and place’ (170). However, rather than presenting the island as an object to be wholly possessed, Park imbues the island with the dual logics of fantasy and denial, creating a constitutive contrast that is folded into an image of the self. Reflecting on her decision to live on Norfolk Island, Park notes:

I had considered so many islands, up and down the Australian coast, and even as far afield as the outliers of Fiji. The ocean, after all, is speckled with delectable dots of islands, ravishing, secluded, and often inconvenient to the point of madness. My desire was for an island refuge both convenient and inconvenient, and so my mind had finally settled on Norfolk Island, only 1600 kilometres from the Queensland coast. (284–85)

The island is depicted as riddled with paradoxes: both ‘convenient and inconvenient’, ‘only 1600 kilometres’ from shore, distinct, yet one of many ‘delectable dots’. These representations suggest a contradictory tension in Park’s use of the island as something to think with and to be possessed, while also critiquing the human desire to fetishise the island as an ontological mirror: ‘we also, it seems, need our islands to be round’ (Fishing 281).⁶ Park’s reflections oscillate between metaphorical possession and negation, hinting at an unwritten presence in her descriptions of window saltscapes and ferny-tasting water: ‘phantoms with low hesitant voices that marched across house, roads, gardens’ (287). Park imagines these spectres – articulated in the same breath as their impossibility – into her writing: ‘eerie mumblings, whispers and shuffles, most uncanny in the stillness’ (289). Yet, she acknowledges that these sounds ‘came from muttonbirds, murmuring to their chicks’.

Rather than imprint her own explorative mark upon the island, Park emphasises the island’s ambiguity and namelessness:

What was its name? Could the island have spoken, I imagine it saying, like God to Moses, ‘I am what I am.’

Secure in selfhood, it did not require a name. Still, mapmakers cannot abide namelessness.

Captain Cook in 1774, called it Norfolk Isle. Nevertheless, it remains what it is and no name cast upon it by a wandering navy captain alters that. (285)

Instead of representing Norfolk Island through the cartographic logics of exploration and imperialism, Park describes the island as autopoetic, accountable only to its own compositional constitution. The phrase ‘I am what I am’ echoes the rhythm of waves crashing on the shore, suggesting a dynamic, self-generating form. This depiction aligns with Park’s description of Australia’s Eastern Coastline, which ‘would give a shrug and cast off all the humans into the sea’, a gesture she associates with a fluid sense of identity (‘Becoming a Writer’). In both cases, Park connects a landmass’s ability to unsettle human claims over territory with a writer’s capacity for reinvention, emphasising the autopoetic quality of both landscape and creative self. The nameless island thus serves as a powerful, enigmatic metaphor for Park’s own mutable writing self. Through this image – where a name fails to capture the island’s essence – Park reflects on the relationship between being and naming, paralleling the objectives of autobiography. As she writes, ‘[T]hat unappeasable thing within me that needed to write had never required fame or success. The writing was sufficient’ (Fishing 301). For Park, writing is an act of being, a means to attain a freedom that transcends fixed identity.

Norfolk’s status as a metaphorical signifier of a writing self underscores the island’s omnipresent meaning of being ‘not remote’, yet ‘a million miles from anywhere if you live here’ (285). This multi-perspectival quality gives the reader a fluid, shifting image of the relationship between lived and imaginative experience characterised in Fishing. To live between these poles is to be, as Park writes of herself upon leaving Aotearoa New Zealand: ‘like a migrating bird, home in two places, always going from one to the other’ (101). These island-to-island glances provided Park with a way to connect past and present events in her memoir. Fishing often uses Norfolk as a narrative device to leap across multiple events in Park’s life, such as when she introduces her last memory of her brother-in-law, Beres: ‘When I visited him in hospital a few days before he died he said, “When I’m better, I’d like to come and stay with you on the Island.” (I was living on Norfolk Island in the Pacific at that time.)’ (38). A similar temporal leap occurs when Park juxtaposes Norfolk with the Sydney city in which she completed Fishing, where suddenly, Norfolk ‘becomes immense, gullies deeper, hillsides rearing up like the walls of skyscrapers’ (289). In contrast to ‘the locked up, barren, suspicious city’, Norfolk is rendered on an epic scale, with a ‘sky powdered with stars as with icing sugar’ (287). Yet, just a paragraph later, Park encloses Norfolk within the limits of her immediate vision, still at her typewriter, ‘enclosed in a bubble or glassy dome’. Descriptions of island arrivals and departures signify dramatic associative shifts between states of mind and existence for Park as a writer. As a result, in Park’s fiction and memoirs, islands are not defined by economies of scale or national boundaries but by their capacity to remain nameless – a sign of their autopoetic self-authorship. Ultimately, as Park reportedly said to her longtime literary agent Tim Curnow around the time she wrote Fishing, ‘we’re islanders’.