The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954)(about) |
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Wednesday 5 March 1947
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Novelist Tells
Why She
Wrote Of Slums
Miss Ruth Park, who won first prize in the "Herald's" literary competition for her. novel of Syd- ney's slums, "The Harp in the South," told the Sydney Literary and Debating Society last night that she had been shocked to dis- cover that hundreds of Sydney people did not know that slums existed in their city.
She said that when she wrote the novel she had ,no intention of writing propaganda against slums. She thought her work would have- been criticised for its literary style, and she was. "astonished and horrified" to find that most of her critics were in- censed because she had dared to write about slums.
"To - place a blue pencil mark against one section of society and say 'This is not to be written about' seems to me the negation of Christianity," she said.
"I was just as horror-stricken and unbelieving as my critics when I first went to live in Surry Hills. 1 could hardly believe that such conditions could exist in a civilised country.I1 hated the environment and still do. But it was not because of a locality that I wrote my novel. It was be- cause I came to love the people, found humanity there, and felt 1 had to write about it all."
Miss Park said she did "not believe that slums would be pulled down and abolished because someone wrote about them in a book. Not everyone was convinced of the need for slum clearance, even in the slums them- selves. Most people she had met in Surry Hills were third-generation slum dwellers, and most of them had so adapted themselves to mean condi- tions that they did not wish to leave.
A great nany mothers in the basic wage families longed to get away, but a great many of the fathers did
not.