D'Arcy Niland

D'Arcy Francis Niland (20 October 1917 - 29 March 1967) was an Australian novelist and short story writer, best known for The Shiralee.

Niland was born in Glen Innes, New South Wales into a large Irish Catholic family. He was named by his father after the Australian boxer Les Darcy, but Niland changed the spelling of his first name as an adult. He left school at 14 and for a time (at age 16) worked in Sydney as a copy-boy for The Sun newspaper. The Depression ended this employment and for some years he travelled the country working in a wide variety of occupations. He married the New Zealand author Ruth Park in 1942. After their marriage the Nilands travelled through the outback of Australia for a time before settling in Surry Hills in Sydney where they earned a living writing full-time.

Between 1949 and 1952 he won many prizes for short stories and novels, and in 1955 achieved international fame with his novel The Shiralee. This was followed by Call Me When the Cross Turns Over (1957) and four more novels. He also wrote radio and television plays, and hundreds of short stories, some of which were published in four books between 1961 and 1966.

His best known work, The Shiralee, portrayed an Australian swagman named Macauley and his daughter. It was published in 1955 and was made into a 1957 film starring Peter Finch and a 1987 TV mini-series starring Bryan Brown. Niland also collected a series of Australian folk songs under the title Travelling songs of old Australia (1966).

Ruth Park has edited and published his short stories, the Penguin Best Stories of D'Arcy Niland (1987) and completed his research into the life of Les Darcy, in the form of the biography, Home Before Dark (1995), written with her son-in-law Rafe Champion. The later is based on Niland's immense collection of books, photographs, clippings, letters, unpublished memoirs and taped interviews supplemented by subsequent research. In 1961 Niland and Park spent time in the United States gathering information on Darcy's experiences there, talking with old boxers, trainers, promoters, companions, even the doctors who fought to save his life. Picking up where Niland left off, the biography is a carefully compiled chronicle of Darcy's short life as seen through the eyes of his contemporaries, which also throws light on the national life during the years of the Great War.

Park's autobiographies A Fence around the Cuckoo and Fishing in the Styx include details of her life with Niland and their five children.

References

• Moore, Bruce (2000). "Niland, D'Arcy Francis (1917 - 1967)". Australian Dictionary of Biography. Canberra: National Centre of Biography, Australian National University. ISBN 978-0-522-84459-7. ISSN 1833-7538. OCLC 70677943. Retrieved 2007-12-11.