Ruth Park - Personal History

Personal History

Park was born in Auckland to a Scottish father and a Swedish mother. Her family later moved to the town of Te Kuiti further south in the North Island of New Zealand, living in isolated areas.

During the Great Depression her working class father did various jobs. He laboured on bush roads and bridges, worked as a driver, did government relief work and found employment as a sawmill hand. Finally, he shifted back to Auckland where he joined the workforce of a municipal council. The family occupied public housing, known in New Zealand as a state house, and money remained a scarce commodity. After attending a Catholic primary school, Park won a partial scholarship to secondary school, but her high-school education was broken by periods of being unable to afford to attend.

Park's first break as a professional writer came when she was hired by the Auckland Star newspaper as a journalist but she found the assignments that she was given to be unchallenging. Wishing to expand her horizons, she accepted a job offer from the San Francisco Examiner but the United States' entry into the Second World War after the bombing of Pearl Harbour forced a change of plan. Instead, she moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1942, where she had lined up a job with another newspaper.

That same year she married the budding Australian author D'Arcy Niland (1917–1967), whom she had met on a previous visit to Sydney, and embarked on a career as a freelance writer. Park and Niland would have five children. The youngest of them, twin daughters Kilmeny and Deborah, went on to enjoy careers as book illustrators. (Park was devastated when Niland died in Sydney at the age of 49 from a heart ailment; Kilmeny also predeceased her—see Herald obituary.) Park has eleven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.