Online via Zoom, please contact Monique Rooney for the link.

“The Three Wise Men of Gotham loved the springtime so greatly they could not bear to see it vanish. So they built a fence around the cuckoo.” (A Fence Around the Cuckoo, 1992)

With this epigraph, Ruth Park opens the first volume of her two-part autobiography. It captures the autobiographical project as a gleeful wish to preserve the springtime of her life even as she—knowingly—writes her own version of it into memory.

In “Springtime, with Fences,” I chart aspects of Park’s teenage years, beginning with the epigraph and title phrase—“a fence around the cuckoo”—as a form of tactical folly that points to Park’s self-mocking awareness of what it means to write autobiographically. Her epigraph summons the “fools” of Gotham from the medieval Merrie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham, who acted foolishly in order to deter the building of a road into their village. Observing the Depression-era dislocation of her family’s move from Te Kuiti to Auckland, I trace some of Park’s early publications in the New Zealand Herald and Auckland Star, her schooling with the Josephites, and her emergent ambition to write. A central section brings the archive into conversation with A Fence Around the Cuckoo, showing how small divergences between memory and paper record reveal Park’s art of selective revelation—her way of keeping what mattered most in view while quietly fencing off certain aspects.

In presenting this draft chapter from my work-in-progress biography, I touch on what it means to write the life of a writer who did not want a biographical road to be made into her life.

Dr Monique Rooney is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. She is the author of Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) and Brow Network: Taste-Making in Contemporary Art and Literature (forthcoming in 2026 with the University of Iowa Press). Her essays have appeared in Angelaki, Textual Practice, and Film-Philosophy. In 2023, she was awarded the Nancy Keesing Research Fellowship to study Ruth Park’s papers in the Mitchell Library, and in 2025 she received a Highly Commended recognition for the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship for her proposed biography of Ruth Park.