Australian children’s classics: Playing Beatie Bow is a time-slip novel that makes Sydney strange

Imogen Annesley as Abigail in the 1986 film of Playing Beatie Bow.

ABC iView My copy of Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow was given to me by my mother in 1982, when I was 14 – the same age as the novel’s protagonist, Abigail Kirk.

A sticker inside shows that my mother bought it at the Feminist Bookshop in Balmain, a shop I remember visiting with her more than once.

The shop is long gone, and the Sydney where my mother bought the book has constantly been altered.

“In the first place, Abigail Kirk was not Abigail at all” is the novel’s striking opening sentence.

Immediately, Park gives us a girl who feels out of place.

It turns out she is not at home in her name or her family.

Soon, her home city of Sydney will become strange to her too.

Almost half a century after its first publication in 1980, Playing Beatie Bow (also a 1986 film ) has never gone away.

It remains in print, with a new hardback edition appearing next month in Penguin’s Modern Australian Classics series.

It is an Australian children’s classic whose great subject is time.

The books we read as children can shape us forever – as readers and people.

In this series , we asked experts to reflect on some of Australia’s most beloved children’s classics, spanning the 19th century to the new millennium.

A time-slip novel Playing Beatie Bow is a time-slip novel: it takes a girl living in Sydney in 1980 and makes the city’s past a physical reality to her.