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In a 1939 letter addressed to Australian writer D’Arcy Niland, New Zealand born author Ruth Park wrote that he was the only person that she had met who did not think women “inferior mentally.” “I’m at home amidst the thump of machinery and the smell of ink and paper,” Park continued in the same letter, touching on an underlying meaning of their letter-based relationship—their “inky comradeship.” The committed pen-friendship, which had begun in late 1937, had by 1939 developed a certain intimacy. This development culminated in Park’s migration in 1942 to Australia, where she married Niland and where the two made their living as freelance writers. Following the success of Park’s The Harp in the South (1946), news about, and interviews with, the couple appeared in newspapers and fashion magazines. In these pages as well as in their light-hearted marriage memoir The Drums Go Bang (1956), Park and Niland advertised the progressively egalitarian spirit of their marriage, which involved balancing writing commitments with shared domestic duties and child-rearing.

Based on my research into Park’s archives, this paper explores the writerly marriage of Park and Niland as one founded on mutual help. With reference to John Durham Peters’s definition of media as “infrastructures” of environment and being—of “the habitats and materials through which we act and are”—the paper reads a selection of Park and Niland’s unpublished letters in the light of Park’s understanding of her writing, her environment and her own body as media. I propose that Park and Niland’s “inky comradeship” is of a piece with Park’s self-conceptualisation as a writer who is “at home amidst the thump of machinery and the smell of ink and paper.”

Monique Rooney teaches in the English Program in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics (ANU). She is the author of Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (2015) and her essays on US literature film and new media and Australian literature are published or forthcoming in Textual Practice, Angelaki, Australian Literary Studies and other journals.

In 2023, she is the Nancy Keesing Fellow at the State Library of NSW where she is researching Ruth Park’s papers in preparation for writing a literary biography.

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