Playing Beatie Bow (First Edition)

The first edition of Ruth Park’s celebrated Sydney time-slip novel, winner of the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book of the Year in 1981 and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in 1982.

Abigail, born Lynette, is a teenager in 1970s Sydney whose father has left the family. Watching children play “Beatie Bow” in a park, she becomes fascinated by a shaven-headed girl, follows her, and slips back in time to 1873. She finds herself in The Rocks among the Bow family, whose granny believes Abigail has “the gift”, and she learns to see her own life differently. The novel uses the real streets of the district, including the steps beside the Argyle Cut that Sydney readers still call the “Beatie Bow steps”. Lisa Murray, writing in the Dictionary of Sydney, links the book to Park’s concern for a vanishing Sydney, the same concern behind her 1973 Companion Guide to Sydney.

Ruth Park was born in Auckland and moved to Sydney in 1942, the year she married the writer D’Arcy Niland. She made her name with The Harp in the South (1948), a novel of Irish slum life in Surry Hills. She also wrote the children’s radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat and won the Miles Franklin Award in 1977 for Swords and Crowns and Rings. She lived on Norfolk Island from 1974 to 1981 and was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 1987.

Playing Beatie Bow appeared in January 1980 and won the CBCA Book of the Year: Older Readers in 1981, followed in 1982 by the Parents’ Choice Award, the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and an IBBY Honour Diploma. In the same year it was runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize. It became a film in 1986, made by the South Australian Film Corporation, and was staged by the Sydney Theatre Company in 2021.

PARK, Ruth. Playing Beatie Bow. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1980.

First edition, first printing. Octavo. 196 pp. Original teal cloth in the pictorial dust jacket, unclipped. A bit of sunning to the jacket spine, a touch of rubbing to the cover boards and a small marking here and there internally. Overall a lovely, bright and crisp copy. A near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket.

Not currently on display in store. For viewing or more information, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000913