'A Window of Life': The Writing of Ruth Park - ASAL Mini-conference 2024

'A Window of Life': The Writing of Ruth Park

14 - 16 February 2024, Sir Roland Wilson building #120 McCoy Circuit, ANU

Public lecture and mini-conference presented by the Research School of the Humanities and the Arts (RSHA), The Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), Copyright Australia (CA) and the ANU Centre for Australian Literary Cultures (CALC) hosted by the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics.

In a 1942 letter to her penfriend and fellow writer D’Arcy Niland, Ruth Park wrote: "I feel, and I know you do too, that I'm a window of life... I can, when clear enough, be the medium through which others may see. This is the mission of the writer, surely—not to propagandise, which is to subtly twist the simplest things, but to depict good and bad as they are. However, one is so damnably impotent to express the exquisiteness of life as it surges within one.” At the time she wrote these words, Park—aged 25—was working as a journalist and editor at the Auckland Star. Her self-characterisation as a “window of life” reflects her confidence and self-aware writerly ambition. It also highlights her dedication to her particular brand of realism—to present “good and bad as they are” without “subtly twisting the simplest things.”

Written in the year that she migrated to Australia, where she would marry Niland, these words serve as a touchstone for the 2024 mini-ASAL conference that focuses on the work, life, and legacy of New Zealand-Australian author Ruth Park. The conference invites participants to explore Park as a writer who embraced opportunities in emerging media industries, and who produced a body of works that help us better understand the transformative forces shaping her century.

The lecture and all conference sessions will be delivered online and in-person (registration required for both options).