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…