D'Arcy Niland - Life and Writing Career

Life and Writing Career

Niland was born in the rural town of Glen Innes, New South Wales, into a large Irish-Catholic family, in 1917. The baby was named by his father after the Australian boxer Les Darcy (1895–1917), but Niland changed the spelling to D'Arcy as an adult.

Niland left school at 14 and for a time (at age 16) worked in Sydney as a copy-boy for The Sun newspaper, hoping to become a reporter. The Depression ended this avenue of employment, however, and for some years he travelled the country, finding work in a wide variety of occupations. He married the New Zealand-born journalist and budding author Ruth Park in 1942.

After their marriage, Niland and Park travelled through the outback of Australia for a time before settling in Surry Hills, then a tough working-class suburb of Sydney, where they earned a living writing full-time and garnering critical praise for their works. Eventually, their marriage produced five children.

Between 1949 and 1952, Niland won many prizes for his short stories and novels and, three years later, achieved international fame with the novel The Shiralee. This was followed by Call Me When the Cross Turns Over (1957) and four more novels. He also wrote radio and television plays, and hundreds of short stories, some of which were collected and published in four volumes from 1961 to 1966.

Of all Niland's books, The Shiralee remains his most renowned. It portrays the wanderings and experiences of an Australian swagman named Macauley and his daughter. It was published in 1955 and made into a 1957 film, starring Peter Finch, and a 1987 TV mini-series, starring Bryan Brown. Niland also compiled a collection of Australian folk songs, releasing them under the title Travelling songs of old Australia (1966).

Park edited the pick of her husband's short stories after his death and they were published by Penguin Books in 1987. She also completed his research into the life of Les Darcy, releasing it in the form of a biography, Home Before Dark (1995), that was written with her son-in-law Rafe Champion. The Darcy biography is drawn from Niland's immense archive of books, photographs, clippings, letters, unpublished memoirs and taped interviews about the ill-fated boxer, supplemented by subsequent research. (A hero to many Irish Australians, Darcy had died of an infection in America at the height of his sporting powers, only a few months before Niland's birth in 1917.)

In 1961, Niland and Park had spent time in the United States gathering information on Darcy's experiences there, talking with old fighters, trainers, promoters and associates, as well as the doctors who strove to save Darcy's life. Picking up where Niland left off, the Park-completed biography is a carefully compiled chronicle of Darcy's short life as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries. It also throws light on the Australian national mood during the years of World War I.

Niland was burdened with a chronic heart condition (it had prevented him from serving with the Australian armed forces during World War II), and he died at the age of 49.

Park's autobiographies A Fence around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx include details of her life with Niland and their five children. Their twin daughters, Kilmeny and Deborah, have both forged successful careers as book illustrators. Park died in Sydney in 2010, aged 93. Her obituary appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper on 17 December of that year.