Early postwar Sydney: a comparison of its portrayal in fiction and in official documents

Abstract

Literature is a valid source for geographers. In particular, it can offer the humanistic geographer a source of information about the experience of living in certain environments and about the way people thought about their lives. When writers are dealing with their firsthand experience, literature can also be a source of factual data Two novels by Ruth Park and one by Dorothy Hewett, set in early postwar inner Sydney, are analysed on the basis of Ley's (1983) humanistic parameters of security and stress, stimulus and ennui, and stigma and status. The fictional picture is then compared with an official planning document published in 1948. It is concluded that not only literature, but also non‐fiction should be approached sceptically.

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