Shame in Ruth Park’s Inner Sydney Novels

Introducing inner Sydney and the focus on shame

This essay explores the multi-layered place of shame in Ruth Park’s inner Sydney novels. The mid-twentieth-century Sydney inner city forms the background to The Harp in the South (1948; hereafter Harp) and its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange (1949; hereafter Orange), both set in Surry Hills at the time they were written. In closing, I turn briefly to Park’s 1953 A Power of Roses, which is set in Miller’s Point. Here, the Harbour Bridge looms over a short-term lodging and its collection of residents, many of them destitute pensioners living in abject poverty.

Historian Alan Mayne shows that a gulf in class experience was central to a late Victorian genre of reportage about conditions in inner Sydney’s crowded portside ‘slums’, which depicted a ‘separate world of dirt, disease and immorality’ to shocked middle-class readers (192). In fact, many residents of these areas were themselves concerned about and complained of the health effects of poor ventilation, inadequate sanitation, foul odours and the like. By the late nineteenth century, working-class Australian families were moving to the suburbs. Order and health were part of the ‘suburban ideal’ (Brett 121). However, life in the suburbs remained costly and inconvenient: working families thus remained residents of inner-city locales where they could walk to their place of work, either in factories, on the docks or in local enterprises (Mayne 196).

A first wave of slum clearances gained momentum after an 1881 outbreak of smallpox in Surry Hills. This involved condemning and demolishing the most ruinous inner-city buildings without provision of new housing. Overcrowding was thus ‘not relieved’ but instead ‘intensified’, explains Mayne (194). An outbreak of bubonic plague in Darling Harbour in the early 1900s ‘resulted in the demolition of small sections of inner-city residential areas’, some of them with a high concentration of Chinese occupants (Spearritt 66). Slum reform then lost momentum in the first decades of the twentieth century. During the Depression, debates about landlord-owned properties, evictions and the exploitation of tenants were prominent, which in turn reawakened concern about slum areas. Despite renewed attention to the issue in the 1930s, ‘little was done in the way of slum clearance and rehousing during the war’ (Spearritt 75).

Ruth Park sailed to wartime Sydney in 1942 to meet and eventually marry writer D’Arcy Niland. After six months of travelling around inland Australia – Park working as a shearer’s cook – they moved to Surry Hills amid a severe housing shortage. In 1946, Ruth Park entered the Sydney Morning Herald novel prize, a stimulus for postwar literary and cultural development. Park’s winning submission centred on the Darcy family, who live at twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street in Surry Hills. The Darcy family comprises Mumma (the matriarch is granted no other name in the novel) and Hughie, who works in a factory. Rowena or Roie, Mumma and Hughie’s delicate eldest daughter, works in a box factory before her marriage to Charlie, an Aboriginal man who was raised by an itinerant swagman and is a machinist in a printery. Dolour, their younger daughter is spirited and ambitious: she attends the local Catholic school, idealising the nuns who are her teachers. A son, Thady, disappeared from the streets years ago, a loss that haunts especially Mumma’s life.¹ Mumma’s mother, Grandma, at turns cantankerous and mischievous, lives with the family for a time, sleeping on a narrow stretcher; various boarders are denizens of two attic rooms and part of the lively household. Controversy surrounded the announcement of Harp as winner of the competition. Park’s first novel, critics decried, depicted a squalid and seemingly immoral world, detailing bedbug infestations and the procurement of backyard abortions; some readers thought the subject matter unfit for literature, others disputed the existence of Victorian conditions in postwar Sydney and others still accused Park of jeering at the poor. Despite expressing its distaste, Angus and Robertson honoured the agreement and Harp was published as a book in 1948.²

The problem of the inner Sydney slums was by then a theme of a considerable literature devoted to postwar reconstruction. Plans for postwar slum eradication and new models of social housing feature in Harp’s sequel, Orange, as Park’s characters discuss their uncertain future with a mix of trepidation, defiance and desire. In reality, redevelopment of the inner city ‘took place on a much smaller scale than was originally intended’ (Spearritt 79) and unfolded over decades. Home ownership rates grew dramatically in the postwar era, not just in the booming suburbs but also in the inner city (Spearritt 79). Harp itself was embraced by social reformers who seized on certain of its descriptions – mazy back streets, filthy yards smelling of cabbage stalks, resident rats – as confirmation of the need for slum clearances. Parts of Surry Hills were demolished, and the Devonshire Street public housing estate built, which Park herself officially declared open in 1951. These flats boasted ‘all the light, ventilation, and modern conveniences the aged cottages and terraces lacked’ (85), Park remembered in her autobiography Fishing in the Styx (1993; hereafter Fishing). She also expressed ambivalence about the concentration of poverty in high-density high-rise estates and recognised that the dispersal of the inner-city poor to the distant new postwar settlements of Green Valley and Mt Druitt destroyed the ‘cosy contiguity of crowded Surry Hills’, isolating people far from their networks of support (Fishing 84). However, it is beyond the scope of this essay to probe more deeply Park’s complicity in and perspective on these broader events.

I argue here that Park’s inner Sydney fiction is strikingly attuned to the complex psychosocial toll of poverty, which erodes self-worth and self-respect and entails the lurking presence of shame (Sennett). Much contemporary work on shame is indebted to clinical psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ theorising of negative affects (i.e., Sedgwick and Frank; Probyn). Tomkins identified shame as the ‘affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation’ (118). Shame causes ‘inner torment’, producing an immediate response – downcast eyes, a dropped head – that ‘calls a halt’ to both looking at another and being looked at (119, 120). Tomkins’ emphasis, then, lies with the activation of shame through initial excitement or interest in another, which is met with contempt. Shame, Tomkins teaches, is corrosive, ‘a sickness of the soul’ (118), but its relational dimension means it is also productive, sharpening the definition of the self.

Tomkin’s insights into the psychology of shame are productively joined with social analysis of class domination and its intimate effects. Class domination wounds, as the sociologists Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb powerfully show in their classic 1972 work, The Hidden Injuries of Class. In homing in on shame’s role in class domination, sociologist Andrew Sayer identifies a hard-to-articulate and pervasive ‘low-level’ shame that is the ‘product of a subordinate class position’ where a sense of inferiority and lack has been internalised (157). Sayer distinguishes this pervasive low-level shame, which is carried around by the socially subjugated, from the more intensely felt episodic shame described by Tomkins, which produces an acute shame response within specific, excruciating encounters.

In this essay, I demonstrate that Park’s writing explores manifold moments of both low-level and episodic shame in poor and working-class lives, with a keen awareness of the intersections of class, gender and race. Park’s treatment of shame is especially illuminating for two main reasons. First, she depicts a wide range of everyday moments and encounters that generate shame in varying intensities and durations. In this essay, I identify several forms of shame: the shame of privation, the shame of being rendered an object of study, the shame associated with female sexuality, racialised shame as a historical stain and the shame of being patronised by experts and authorities. Second, Park is deeply interested in how her characters grapple with the shame that sometimes envelops and overwhelms them and how they might recover their sense of self and value. Hughie does so by drinking, while other characters articulate their rage and defiantly assert their worth. I also show how, in certain moments, Park’s characters cope with shame by rejecting or ignoring middle-class expertise that undermines intergenerational knowledge transmission and community norms. Finally, I demonstrate that these characters invest in an alternate source of collective pride – mutualism and generosity – which helps them to recuperate their sense of self-worth.

Cobbling the holes: Shame, clothing and privation

Sustained by factory wages and the lodgers’ rent, the Darcy family is not desperate, but their circumstances, as depicted in Harp and Orange, are pinched and they often go without. This privation is sometimes acutely felt: they miss out on experiences; ration little luxuries; and endure discomfort, sharing beds and cramped rooms. Further, their poverty is visible, exposing them to others’ judgements and assumptions. That is, they carry around the low-level, pervasive shame to which Sayer points. Their vulnerability to the shame of privation assumes prominence the evening Dolour competes in the ‘Junior Information, Please’ quiz session, which is broadcast on radio.

At home at twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street on the evening of the quiz session, Hughie blusters about, afraid that Dolour will be exposed as ignorant and be laughed at, while Mumma worries about what she will wear. Dolour has only an old, faded school uniform; Roie lends her a pink blouse. Mumma herself first tries on an old coat that has a tomato sauce stain before deciding on a red cardigan with a hole in the elbow. Roie quickly cobbles the hole; with a skilful ‘wrinkling of the sleeve they managed to hide the darn satisfactorily’ (Harp 161). Roie reaches here for a handy little trick, a strategy to get by, which serves to obscure the evidence of their circumstances.

At the studio, the Darcys are overawed, especially Hughie who writhes in his seat and groans ‘in spirit’ when he sees his daughter on stage (163). Soon after:

Dolour was standing in front of the microphone, a thin badly-clothed child with bony legs and a sliver of white petticoat showing above them. The pink blouse looked ludicrous. Roie blushed for shame. (164)

Dolour’s petticoat – and her poverty – is on show up on stage. This is part of why the scene causes pain to Hughie and Roie: her bodily being and its coverings are out of place. That which is meant to shield Dolour makes her especially naked. Indeed, Tomkins speculates that ‘clothing originated in the generalisation of shame to the whole body, and the consequent need to cover it from the stare of the other’ (120). When asked her question, Dolour at first fumbles and then excels. Mumma’s pride is silent but Hughie swells as ‘all the mediocrity of his being vanished’ (Harp 165).

Intersubjective encounters across class, such as the evening spent at the radio studio, risk generating in Hughie the shame of ‘defeat’ identified by Tomkins (118). However, in this scene, he is granted a reprieve, basking in the recognition of his young daughter’s achievement instead. Hughie is aware that people are glancing at his family, but this time they do so with interest, not pity or censure. Hughie relishes rather than recoils from others’ curious glances. The pervasive shame of poverty is thus transcended through scholastic achievement in this set piece. The shame that Roie grapples with as a young woman is not as easily triumphed over, as the following exploration of gendered shame establishes.

‘Her soul crept into a dark corner’: Examples of gendered shame

In Harp, Roie is first wooed and then cruelly scorned by her first boyfriend, Tommy Mendel. Mendel has a disability, which he seeks to overcome by proving his masculinity. Deep into the relationship, Tommy accuses Roie of giving him the ‘come-on’ and then torturing him by refusing sex (86). Drawing on contemporary arguments about ‘reproductive coercion’, historian Catherine Kevin argues, in her essay published in this issue, that Tommy rapes Roie in this scene. Park shows Roie wrestling internally with her distinctly maternal empathy for the ‘chafings of his dully daily life’; out loud, she says, ‘No, Tommy … please, Tommy, no.’ (86, 87). After Roie realises she is pregnant, she in a sense takes on Tommy’s shame about his physical deficit. As historian Clare Monagle notes, after the Fall, ‘The life-giving capacities of a female body are … always also a sign of Eve’s fundamental failure, a visible location of shame’ (19). An unmarried young Irish Catholic woman, Roie hides the pregnancy from her parents and does overtime at the box factory to save money for a termination. Roie is four months pregnant by the time she has amassed ten pounds for an abortion. She raises the iron knocker on a forbidding, dank house where a doctor ‘[g]ood as a Macquarie Street man’ is rumoured to perform abortions (Harp 105).

Literary scholar Nicole Moore contends that Park relies on two clichés in the scenes depicting Roie’s brush with illegal abortion. First, she is an innocent, naïve working-class girl – Moore reads her as seduced into momentarily breaking with her Catholic morality out of compassion for Tommy. Second, Roie encounters a married woman at that dank house who embodies working-class women’s supposed ‘callous insouciance’; this character is drawn as bold and oversexed, in the process of getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy by seeking another abortion (78). It is this woman’s screams that terrify Roie the night of her appointment; she leaves the house, is set upon and beaten up by drunk sailors and loses the pregnancy, conveniently sparing Roie from Mumma and the reader’s ultimate moral judgement. Yet Park’s plot also works against the cliché of innocent and passive suffering, as Moore acknowledges. The abortion does not eventuate – but in the lead-up to it, Roie carefully plans to end her unwanted pregnancy, sustaining an inner monologue in which she rejects the idea that she should feel ashamed of her predicament and intentions: ‘“But it’s not a sin for me,” she thinks desperately to herself. “It’s the only thing I can do.”’ (108). Further, she feels ‘nothing for the baby’, reasoning that ‘it wasn’t really a baby yet’ (103). Park thus empathetically conjures Roie’s invidious bind, plainly setting out the realities and risks of illegal abortion.

Park also challenges the prevailing morality surrounding sex work through the character of Delie Stock in Harp. Stock is likely based on underworld identity Kate Leigh, who sold ‘sly grog’ in Surry Hills. When the school’s priest hesitates to accept a gift from Stock – who intends to treat the children to a picnic – Stock launches into her life story. She explains that when she ‘started’, it was just ‘a boy here and there … never got a bean for it’ (43). It was ‘hard work and good business brains’ that ensured Stock’s subsequent success (43). Stock challenges the priest, asking him, ‘What chance does any woman get around here?’ (43). Evoking the drudgery and exhaustion of working-class womanhood, she defends her pragmatic decision to ‘make the most’ of what she has (44). Literary scholar F. C. Molloy reads Stock as a pitiful character, concluding that she remains on the periphery of Surry Hills social life due to her lack of respectability and that she ‘attempts to buy acceptance by occasional bouts of charity’ (321). I, however, interpret Stock’s generous gesture in less reductive terms. Stock may peddle immoral goods, but in this combative exchange she deflects the priest’s moral judgement, pointing with pride to her community spirit – she routinely funds local funerals, for example. Park writes that Stock ‘could no longer feel shame, but she could feel anger and bitter resentment against those who thought that she should’ (Harp 41). The priest eventually accepts her donation, choosing to accept Stock’s claim that she won these funds at the lottery. The priest is forced to recognise that he is out of his depth in his encounter with this formidable, unashamed woman.

In Orange, Park depicts a far more explicit instance of episodic gendered shame arising from a particularly degrading encounter with a representative of the middle class. Orange is Harp’s sequel, a bleaker novel serialised in the Herald in 1949. Its events take place soon after the first novel left off. By this stage, Roie is married with a daughter and becomes pregnant again. Soon enough, she ‘had to screw up her courage to go to the hospital to be examined’ (30). Roie recoils from the prospect of ‘having the dark, inner-most secrets of her body probed, and written about on index cards’ (30). The public hospital’s bureaucracy is bewildering, and the wait long. When she is finally admitted to the examination ward, Roie clambers upon the high white table, overwhelmed with ‘sickness and terror’ (31). Roie steels herself: the doctor is a kindly man with gentle hands and a ‘crackling white coat’ (31). She closes her eyes, reminding herself this will all be over very soon. With her eyes shut, Roie hears nearby voices. Then:

To her appalled horror she saw five or six young men … dressed up in white coats, and crowding in behind the screen round the bed. They were medical students. She half-raised herself up, but the doctor gently put her down again.

‘They – what are they doing here?’ she whispered.

‘They’re going to be doctors some day,’ said the doctor. ‘They have to learn.’

‘Yes,’ whispered Roie. She kept her eyes closed tight, hearing what the doctor said to the students with a shame too great to bear. She felt no resentment or anger, nothing but terrible humiliation, of uncleanness and violation of her innermost womanhood. Her soul crept into a dark corner. (31)

In the next cubicle, another poor, pregnant woman objects, ‘[T]hey aint gonna learn on me!’ (32). Indignant, this woman insults the gawping students, one of whom is the same age as a son of hers, and a furious outburst drowns out the doctor’s explanations about public good:

‘Yeah? Then why not use all women for guinea-pigs, eh? Why only public hospitals? Do you ever go into a posh private hospital out Vaucluse or Point Piper with your tribe of pop-eyed young louts and let them have a squint at one of them pampered poodles of women?’ (32)

This defiant patient seeks to shame the doctor instead, laying bear his bad faith. ‘They have to learn’, the doctor had told Roie, after using his ‘gentle hands’ to push her down (31). His kindly manner and gentle wielding of authority makes this scene of coercion especially unbearable. In elaborating his argument about shame’s activation in relation with another, Tomkins states, ‘[O]ne must have expected good things to come from the other person before the other’s contempt produces shame’ (137). The incensed woman in the other cubicle forces the reader’s recognition that what the doctor reasons mildly is ‘for the good of all women’ is in fact unethical class-based practice (Orange 32).

In this scene, Roie’s body is rendered an object of study. She is consumed by the ‘inner torment’ Tomkins writes of and her withdrawal ‘calls a halt’ to the doctor’s penetrating classed gaze (118, 120). Roie leaves the hospital distressed, and Park steers her character into a church to ‘hide her shock and shame’ – this place too is dusty and ‘shadowy’ (Orange 32). Roie is modest and virtuous: she wishes only to share her body with her husband and children, not to be inspected and probed by junior members of the middle class who assume their role as experts over working-class women’s sexuality and their mothering – a theme to which I return below. Shame in this hospital scene is both explicitly named and deeply visceral, inducing a withering and withdrawing: a ‘shame too great to bear’ floods Roie and, in the church, she pleads with God to let her forget it (31). Eventually, she makes her way into the glare of the streets, heat shimmering on the asphalt. The chapter closes with a Park-like narrator stepping in to rescue Roie’s dignity. Park regularly deploys an observational, journalistic voice in her early novels. Rarely, however, does she pronounce moral or political judgement on her character’s actions. This scene is an exception as Park’s narrator condemns the public health system’s treatment of poor women, using an incisive vocabulary alien to Roie. When Roie leaves the church, she joins throngs of working-class women ‘laden with shopping baskets, with screaming children, always carrying or pushing or dragging something’. Park continues:

These citadels of strength, of endurance, of deep undemonstrative dignity were deemed by authority to have no dignity at all. No one would dream of subjecting a rich man’s wife to clinical rape, but the poor man’s wife was different. (32)

Thus, Park explicitly characterises this interpersonal, shaming encounter in terms that highlight the significance of the intersection of gender and class, while also capturing its violence.

Shame, race and historical stain

In mid-twentieth-century white Australia, assimilationist policy and thinking was widely accepted despite Aboriginal activists’ increasingly prominent campaigns for equal citizenship rights. The character of Charlie Rothe provides an opportunity for Park to depict the shame associated with Aboriginal ancestry in this period. After recovering from the violent beating that caused a miscarriage, Roie meets and falls in love with Charlie, who is ‘young and dark’ (Harp 166). Charlie, a machinist at a printery, has ‘long, large, capable hands with rough stained patches from his work’ (169). More significantly, his family history carries what the Darcy family, particularly Mumma, regards as a shameful historical stain. Charlie has a ‘bit of tar in him’ observes Hughie (167), a racist euphemism common in this era, which referred to the negativity and secrecy white Australians associated with Aboriginal descent (Carlson).

Mumma is a sympathetic character, but Park does not shy away from depicting racist aspects of her character. Literary scholar Ronald Paul contends that the ‘uneven combination of tolerance and bigotry’ in these characters’ lives is key to their credibility (95). Hughie is more at ease with Charlie than Mumma; his working life has brought him into contact with many Aboriginal people (see Norman for a rich account of Aboriginal working lives in the Sydney inner city in this period). Hughie’s first response to this stranger is to clasp him by the hand and offer him a cup of tea (or something stronger). Mumma fears that the shame of Aboriginality will enter the family and her grandchildren will be dark-skinned. It is Hughie who eventually confronts Charlie:

‘You won’t get rumbustious now, Charlie boy, because there’s no offence meant, and heaven knows I’m not the one to skite meself, having a hangman in the family, but could you be telling me where the dark blood in you comes out?’ (Harp 173)

In reading this scene, I first note that Hughie’s admission about the hangman in the family highlights the potency of shameful secrets, suggesting that Charlie is not alone in carrying such burdens, rather than indicating a transfer of shame between characters, as occurred from Tommy to Roie. Second, I recognise that Park articulates a liberal defence of racial equality, granting Roie the ‘wisdom’ to understand that ‘colour’ should not be placed before ‘character’: ‘Either people were nice, or they were not’ (174). Hughie, too, declares that ‘black, white or brindle’, Charlie is ‘good and solid’ (179). Literary scholar Monique Rooney summarises that the Darcy’s ‘prejudice does not stick’ as even Mumma comes to ‘begrudgingly’ accept Charlie (10). The third important point is that Charlie is courteous in response to Hughie’s question, implicitly acceding to the Darcy family’s fears, explaining that the Aboriginality in his family lies in distant ancestry (later, the reader learns that his great-grandmother was Aboriginal) and telling Hughie that he expects his children to be white. That is, while the Darcys are depicted as overcoming their racial prejudice, Charlie’s assurances in this scene reproduce white Australia’s anxieties and fantasies as he essentially relates his successful absorption into the category of white. Ultimately, however, Park does not sever Charlie from his culture or connection to Aboriginality, the stated goal of assimilationist thinking and policy. After Roie dies in childbirth, Charlie goes to La Perouse and is looked after by Angus McIntosh, a kindly Aboriginal man, who treats grief-stricken Charlie with ‘brotherliness’ (Orange 138). Rather than a source of historical shame, then, Charlie’s contact with Aboriginality, in this moment at least, becomes a source of kinship, solace and resolve, if not the basis of a more politicised representation of pride. Charlie realises he must keep living for the sake of his children.

Expertise, mutualism and generosity: Alternative measures of moral worth

As already noted, Tomkins highlighted shame’s intensely relational dimension, particularly in discussing its activation. This relational dimension means that it is also productive, sharpening the definition of the self. ‘As much as it may haunt and stultify’, anthropologist Jennifer Biddle writes, ‘[S]hame also shapes and defines, and makes for the very delineations called self-identity’ (236). That is, episodes of shame generate boundaries in the moment of their rupture, bringing both self and collective identity more strongly into being (Mitchell and Vincent). In this final section, I turn to identify the collective identities and values that represent the counterpoint to shame, and which serve to generate self–other distinctions in these novels.

After Roie dies in childbirth, it falls to Mumma to raise her second baby. Mumma returns to the same institution where her pregnant daughter was gazed upon, becoming overwhelmed and sickened with shame, to collect her grandson. There, Mumma endures a condescending encounter, listening ‘dutifully’ to the nurse’s advice and labouring through ‘the booklet of directions given to her’ (Orange 140). Essentially Mumma receives expert professional direction that undermines intergenerational knowledge transmission and working-class community norms. As Park’s narrator puts it, ‘Mumma knew everything about babies, but nothing according to the clinic’ (140). Despite her diligence in the face of authority and social power, Mumma quickly discards the advice of the booklet. Mumma resolves to bring the baby up on love and goat’s milk. While the condescension of professionals has previously been a source of belittlement and shame, in this scene, Mumma returns with pride to memories of her own childhood and stories of a black nanny goat that had ‘supervised the weaning of herself and her ten brothers and sisters’ (140). In procuring a goat, Anny, to keep in their yard, Mumma reorients herself towards her past and her mother, to whom she is fiercely loyal, turning away from practices urged by professionals who do not recognise or accord value to her skills and experience. Importantly, Mumma’s confidence in her own knowledge does not merely represent an individual act of defiance: in effect, the Darcys’ neighbours side with Mumma over various forces of social and state authority. Jimmy Lick, the Chinese grocer, gives Anny his scraps, and Mrs Campion even declares the smell of goat welcome as it might override the smell of tomcat: ‘no bloody health inspector would hear from her’ (141).

Pride and self-respect – the counterpoint to carrying a low-level shame steeped in a sense of being devalued and worthless – is most strongly found in the Surry Hills residents’ shared ethics of mutualism and generosity, as Park portrays it. I have already drawn attention to Delie Stock’s spirited defence of her own way of life via her generosity and community spirit. There are many other examples of Park’s characters’ adherence to a collective code of mutualism, which is in turn a source of pride, collective identity and moral worth that effectively combats shame. One especially elaborated example is found in Hughie’s generosity towards Bumper Reilly. Hughie first meets Reilly in Darlinghurst after he takes a wrong turn, drunk and distressed one hot afternoon. Reilly lives in a rat-infested flophouse, a series of grimy cubbyholes, each home to an invalid or old age pensioner, ‘most of them once good hard workers, who had committed the mortal sin of living too long’ (Orange, 102). Reilly makes Hughie a cup of tea. Park writes, ‘It did not enter his head that it was odd for this stranger to have invited him in; he had often done the same for those who seemed under the weather or influence’ (101). Hughie learns of the rent Reilly is charged to live in squalidity and is incensed, discreetly sliding two bob onto the table. Then, impulsively, he invites Reilly to rent the spare room at twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street. Come Christmas time, Hughie again spontaneously offers to share what he has, much to Mumma’s chagrin, who learns of Reilly’s invitation to Christmas dinner only as she is serving it. Hughie is defensive, telling Mumma he was overcome with feeling for the ‘poor little cow’, who has no surviving family. Mumma is resentful at first but then wonders if she is being ‘mean’ (237). This thought is unbearable, anathema to her self-understanding as a Christian woman, and she quickly prepares a plate for him. Her resentment lingers, and she plans to humiliate Reilly by making it obvious that she has deprived herself of food to incorporate him, leaving a ‘little, forlorn heap of food’ in the middle of her near-empty plate (237). Again, however, her ‘natural generosity’ overwhelms her when he arrives, timid and freshly shaved (238). She quickly rearranges her plate to make it ‘look as though she had as much as everyone else’ (238). In doing so, Mumma produces an illusion of equality at the table, allowing Reilly to share the Darcy Christmas meal with dignity.

Conclusion

In 2023, a fire broke out in a vacant, seven-storey former hat factory in Surry Hills. Built in 1912, the brick building was slated for redevelopment as an inner-city hotel. Fifteen homeless people were understood to be sleeping there; eventually all were accounted for (Beazley and Australian Associated Press). In some ways, the spectre of a hat factory in swanky Surry Hills speaks to the erasure of the city’s past: inner-city streets were once filled with workers who walked between factory work and their nearby homes, as Hughie and Roie did in Park’s fiction of that neighbourhood. Park’s novels vividly conjure the kinds of lives that were being lived out in this place, in this time. More specifically, my reading of these novels delineates various sources of shame in mid-twentieth-century working-class lives. I have focused on episodes of shame ranging from the humiliation of being gazed upon, objectified and patronised by middle-class experts, the anguish and shame associated with their visible poverty, the potentially lethal risk of seeking an illegal abortion and the historical shame associated with Aboriginal ancestry. I have also emphasised the significance of shame’s inverse – pride, and its source in collective values of mutualism and generosity.

The search for those homeless people in the aftermath of the 2023 Surry Hills fire hints at the fact that the contemporary moment is witnessing a return to certain harsh aspects of prewar and early postwar kinds of poverty in Australia. Slum clearances led to social housing in the postwar period, in Surry Hills among other locales, but experiments in the state provision of housing have been retreated from since the 1980s. Long-term renting, which the Darcy family accepted as their lot, is a rising and stressful reality in Australia, in contrast to the postwar rise of home ownership rates. Perhaps especially resonant in the current moment is a scene in the novel A Power of Roses (1953) in which Park explores the intense and confused shame of a Church charity worker who habitually encounters the city’s desperately poor. This young man gives Uncle Puss – one of the novel’s main characters – his own coat before the reverend scolds him, revealing Uncle Puss’s cunning in securing resources. Uncle Puss’s studied presentation of himself as a ‘hungry old man’ initially elicits ‘volcanic sympathy’ from the charity worker. However, this innocent middle-class character is unsure how to react, where to look and how, exactly, to respond once he discovers Uncle Puss is a rascal, even though his need for an overcoat is real (32). Park’s inner Sydney novels insist that, at the very least, we have a responsibility not to look away. They serve as a window through which the reader can see and confront the full humanity of the socially subjugated, no matter how much discomfort or shame this might provoke in middle-class readers.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to my friends Ellen Roberts and Anwen Crawford for re-reading and discussing Park’s early novels with me. Members of the SCRAGS writing group provided invaluable feedback on an early draft of this essay. I am very grateful to Monique Rooney for the invitation and encouragement to contribute to this special issue.