While attracting praise, it had a more romantic view of the world she was describing and never had the same success as her first novel. The book came as a response to a challenge from a New Zealand critic to write something as striking about her own country as she had about Australia. Park followed this with a sequel about the Darcys, Poor Man's Orange (1949), before writing The Witch's Thorn (1951), drawing on her knowledge of Maori-Pakeha (European) relationships as observed from childhood in the King Country region of New Zealand. Hugely successful in Australia, The Harp in the South was translated into 37 languages before being adapted as a television series in the 1980s. The story, which Park described as a domestic comedy about the Catholic Irish-Australian Darcy family, was set against a background of the squalid living conditions and deep poverty of its residents. Park caused outrage when she used Surry Hills as the setting for her first novel, The Harp in the South, which won the Sydney Morning Herald novel competition in 1946 and was serialised in the paper before being published as a book in 1948 and adapted as a radio play in 1949. In The Drums Go Bang! (1956), a joint autobiography written by Park and Niland, they describe their struggle to get established as writers in those early years, during which they were living in Surry Hills, then a deprived district of Sydney. She began a career there first as a freelance writer and then as a novelist.
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