In Tudor Street, they will pause to examine a house with a steeply pitched red-tiled roof behind an ivy-covered fence. From Ward Park on Devonshire Street, they will look across to a red-brick church and hear the late author Ruth Park's feisty words: "You don't want old Delie's tainted dough. There's a hundred and thirty good quids there, and no mangy old bible-banger is going to keep those kids in there from getting it."
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On Saturday April 18, to honour the author and her work, more than 100 people will join the "walk and talk" Harp in the South Day event supported by the Irish National Association of Australasia.
"It's in the tradition of Bloomsday," says "retired and dabbling" actor John Derum, the artistic director of the day. "The association thought, 'here's a book written about the very community we represent, in the very neighbourhood where we are, we should be doing something'."
The Tudor Street house was believed to be Park's model for the fictional and "unlucky" Twelve-and-a-Half Plymouth Street, the "cranky brown house, with a blistered green door", which was the home of the impoverished Darcy family in Park's 1948 tale of life in Surry Hills, Harp in the South.
The red-brick church in Devonshire Street, St Peter's Catholic Church, appears in the novel as St Brandan's church. Park lived in Devonshire Street during World War II in a house that was eventually razed to make way for high-rise public housing.
Harp in the South reflects the life of Surry Hills' hard-scrabbling post-war residents – the Irish, the Chinese and the Europeans – who filled its streets with life and colour.
"It was the sort of thing we read – 'see how the poor oppressed Irish are treated!' – there was a bit of that feeling about the book," says Derum, who appeared in ABC comedies in the 1970s and '80s including The Aunty Jack Show and created and performed a theatre piece on C.J. Dennis, More Than a Sentimental Bloke, which ran for more than 500 shows through the 1980s and '90s.
Derum will provide a linking commentary for four sessions around Surry Hills in which actors including Judy Nunn and Bruce Venables will read from the book, bringing the area's past, Park's fictional narrative, and the present together.
"The book is not historical fact and we're not trying to do a historical factual tour but all the links are everywhere," he says. "You go, 'Ah, that's the sort of place … that would be the street where the abortionist was'; it's just a fun game."
In Ward Park, those attending the event will hear actor Carole Skinner, who played the role of Delie Stock in the 1987 television miniseries based on the book, read a passage in which Stock and St Brandan's Father Cooley have a confrontation over money she wants to donate to the church for a children's picnic. He initially refuses to take her money, "stolen" from the wives and children of the men who spent it in her "foul places of pleasure" in the "furry black shadows" of Surry Hills lanes.
In the novel, Father Cooley reflects on Delie Stock's character: "All the knowledge and disillusion of the devil was hers; her bawdy houses were filled with poor Surry Hills and Redfern kids that grew up starved and ignorant, knowing nothing, trained for nothing, and cast out to earn their livings by their own instincts."
Stock sold dope and manufactured liquor in her backyard "laced with foul fuel spirits ... that filled the brain with madness and murder, and had been the cause of dozens of terrible bloody brawls in those dark back alleys".
The character of Delie Stock is loosely based on that of Kate Leigh, the notorious underworld razor gang figure, who lived in a terrace at 212 Devonshire Street – now a cafe. "It was well known that she was generous," says Derum. "So that confrontation with the priest … I don't think it was totally invented; it's something that (Ruth Park) knew about."
For more information: www.harpinthesouthday.com
