Soon after journalist Ruth Park arrived in Australia during the Second World War, the Manpower Authority directed her husband D’Arcy Niland to join the shearing circuit in far western New South Wales. The newlyweds and D’Arcy’s brother Beres, whom Park adored, traveled for months around rural NSW and Queensland, Park picking fruit, noodling for opals, cooking for shearers, and becoming a Chinese chef’s offsider, among other jobs. In her autobiography, Park describes ‘blinding noon skies’ and a ‘kingly spaciousness’. In Moree and elsewhere, Park observed Indigenous camps on the fringes of towns.

Returning to Sydney, D’Arcy, Beres and Ruth sought lodgings in the midst of an extreme housing shortage. And so the three came to settle in Devonshire Street, Surry Hills. The home of their landlady was formerly a barber’s shop; Beres slept in the old barber’s chair.