The series ended when the radio program folded in 1970.

When the lead actor Albert Collins died suddenly in 1951, she changed its direction and The Muddle-Headed Wombat was born, with first Leonard Teale then John Ewart in the title role. When contracted in 1942 by Ida Elizabeth Osbourne to write a serial for the ABC Children's Session, she wrote the series The Wide-awake Bunyip. In addition, D’Arcy Niland's brother Beresford married Ruth Park's sister Jocelyn. The writer Rafe Champion is her son-in-law. (Park was devastated when Niland died in Sydney at the age of 49 from a heart ailment Kilmeny also predeceased her - see the Herald obituary.) Park had eleven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Park and Niland had five children, of whom the youngest, twin daughters Kilmeny and Deborah, went on to become book illustrators. There she embarked on a career as a freelance writer. That same year she married the budding Australian author D'Arcy Niland (1917–1967), with whom she had been corresponding as pen pals for some years, and whom she had finally met on a previous visit to Sydney. Instead, she moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1942, where she had lined up a job with another newspaper. Wishing to expand her horizons, she accepted a job offer from the San Francisco Examiner, but the tightening of United States' entry requirements after the bombing of Pearl Harbor forced a change of plan. 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 she was given unchallenging. She also completed an external degree course at Auckland University. Ruth Park, after attending a Catholic primary school, won a partial scholarship to secondary school, but her high-school education was broken by periods of being unable to afford to attend.

The family occupied public housing, known in New Zealand as a state house, and money remained a scarce commodity. Finally, he shifted back to Auckland, where he joined the workforce of a municipal council. ĭuring the Great Depression her working-class father laboured on bush roads and bridges, worked as a driver, did government relief work and became a sawmill hand. Her family later moved to the town of Te Kuiti further south in the North Island of New Zealand, where they lived in isolated areas. Park was born in Auckland to a Scottish father and a Swedish mother.

Her best known works are the novels The Harp in the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), and the children's radio serial The Muddle-Headed Wombat (1951–1970), which also spawned a book series (1962–1982). Rosina Ruth Lucia Park AM (24 August 1917 – 14 December 2010) was a New Zealand–born Australian author.

The Harp in the South by Ruth Park