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Not to be confused with Dorothy Hewlett English scholar specialising in 19th century literature, a novelist and playwright.
Dorothy Hewett
Dorothy Hewett in 1981
BornDorothy Coade Hewett
21 May 1923
Perth, Western Australia
Died25 August 2002 (aged 79)
Springwood, New South Wales
Occupations
  • Playwright
  • poet
  • author
Years active1941–2002
Children6

Dorothy Coade Hewett AM (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002), who also wrote as Jael Paris, was a playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.

In her lifetime she had 22 plays performed, and she published nine collections of poetry, three novels and many other prose works, and there have been four anthologies of her poetry. She received many awards and has been frequently included in Australian literature syllabuses at schools and universities. She was regularly interviewed by the media in her later years, and was often embroiled in controversy, even after her death.

Early life and education

Dorothy Hewett at Lambton Downs, age about 12

Dorothy Coade Hewett was born on 21 May 1923 in Perth, Western Australia. Until the age of 12, Hewett lived on a sheep and wheat farm, Lambton Downs, in the Western Australian wheat belt. The selection of nearly 3,000 prime acres had been taken by her maternal grandparents in 1912, and the land was cleared by 15-year-old Albert Facey. It was said of her grandmother Mary Coade that “money stuck to her fingers". Her business acumen made the family wealthy, first in a drapery shop in Perth, then in the wheat belt through farm production, ownership of three local general stores, insider trading in land options along the line of a new railway, and liens on crops and property. Hewett’s father survived the Gallipoli campaign and the Western Front in World War I, and he was twice decorated for bravery.

Hewett was educated through correspondence school till age 12. She and her younger sister told each other elaborate stories about the landscape of the farm. She began writing poetry at the age of six, and her parents would wake in the night to write down her poems. Her first poem was published when she was nine years old. On annual trips to Perth, Hewett became entranced with the theatre and the world of Hollywood. Her mother suffered from severe early-onset menopause symptoms and beat the wilful and imaginative young Hewett.

The family moved to Perth in 1935 where they opened the Regal Theatre in Subiaco. Hewett attended Perth Ladies College, where she had to wear shoes, hat and gloves for the first time, a shock after her ragamuffin life on the farm. As a painfully shy country girl, she was known as "Hermit Hewett". She excelled at English and received the State Exhibition award in English in 1941. To assist his talented daughter, her father took her to a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers.

Hewett enrolled at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 1942, where she participated eagerly in university life. She won the national Meanjin poetry award that year, aged 17. With several friends she founded the University Drama Society and acted in a number of Repertory plays, including a melodrama that she wrote herself. She received high distinctions in English, but failed French for several years and did not graduate.

Realist writer period and the Communist Party

After leaving UWA, Hewett worked in a bookshop and as a cadet journalist with the Perth Daily News, but lost both these jobs. She rejected the lifestyle and aspirations of her wealthy parents and eventually joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). She briefly edited the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star. Dozens of articles authored by Dorothy Hewett appear in the Worker’s Star from 1945-47. Recuperating after an attempted suicide following a failed wartime relationship, she wrote the poem Testament, her first mature work, which won the prestigious ABC Poetry Prize in 1945. On the rebound, she married the Party lawyer Lloyd Davies that year and their child Clancy was born in 1947.

After World War II she briefly re-enrolled at UWA and became editor of the University journal, Black Swan, soon nicknamed "Red" Swan. Her enthusiasm was such that she kept the journal ‘politically pure’ by writing most of the contents herself under various noms de plume. The authorities banned it from distribution in any other Australian university.

Hewett covered the 1946 Pilbara Strike for the Worker’s Star, and wrote the epic ballad, Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod, which cemented her position as a radical author and a supporter of Indigenous rights. However, she now virtually discontinued writing for a life of activism and child-rearing.

In 1949 she fell in love with the boilermaker Les Flood, and eloped with him to Sydney, to live in the inner-city suburb of Redfern The CPA strongly disapproved of what they called immoral behaviour and she had to re-start at the bottom, selling Tribunes and leafleting. The time she spent living in poverty in Kings Cross and Redfern and volunteering for the CPA informed some of her later works. In the period of McCarthyism their house was a regular meeting place for the CPA, devoted to printing and distributing material opposing the Communist Party Dissolution referendum and later the Petrov Commission. During this period, Hewett wrote mostly journalism, under pseudonyms, for the Communist weekly paper Tribune.

The following year her first child, Clancy, died of Acute lymphoblastic leukemia in Melbourne, an event which was to have a profound effect on the rest of her life.

Hewett and Clancy 1949

In 1952 Hewett and Flood joined a trade union delegation to Russia, and they were among the first Westerners to visit the new People’s Republic of China.

Hewett worked for a year as a mill hand in a cotton spinning mill, which gave her the material for her first novel, Bobbin Up. The climatic moment is a strike by the women workers against poor working conditions and unfair dismissals. The style and content are firmly rooted in socialist realism. Bobbin Up was translated into five languages.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Hewett engaged in debates about literature and social change from a committed Marxist perspective. She was one of the founders of the left-wing organisation the Union of Australian Women, editing the first edition of their journal, and she participated enthusiastically in Realist Writers groups in Sydney and Perth.

Flood suffered from recurring paranoid schizophrenia, untreatable at the time, and was unable to work. Hewett took a job as a copywriter on the catalogue of Walton Sears Department Store to support the family. In 1958, as Flood became increasingly violent and dangerous, she fled back to her parents in Western Australia (WA) with their three small boys Joe, Michael and Tom Flood.

In South Perth her parents built a house for her on the old tennis court at the back of their property. Rebuilding her life, Hewett trained at the Graylands Teachers' College but was removed when they found she had been not only married but divorced.

In 1960 she married the poet, cane cutter and seaman, Merv Lilley. Lilley had been a foundation member of the Bush Music Club, and he introduced the family to folk music, which was beginning its revival. In late 1961 the family, which now included one-year-old Kate Lilley, travelled to Queensland with a caravan to visit Lilley’s family. Before leaving WA, Hewett and Lilley roneoed a joint volume of their poetry What About the People? In the next few years a number of these poems were put to music by aspiring folk singers. Weevils in the Flour, a song about the Depression childhood of her friend Vera Deacon, has been a favourite with union choirs and folk singers, with a folklore all of its own. Another song, Sailor Home From the Sea, has been recorded under four different tunes.

Les Flood had been sighted in WA, and to avoid him, the family remained in Queensland for a year and bought an old house in Wynnum, Brisbane. The house had no water or sewerage and Hewett caught an intestinal bug. Afterwards she had ongoing health problems that often confined her to bed.

During 1962 the family participated in the radical salon society along the Brisbane foreshore, led by John Manifold the folklorist and poet. With Nancy Wills, Hewett wrote a short political musical play Ballad of Women, which contains many of the Brechtian elements and figures of her later musicals. She began to publish new poems in Tribune, mostly paeans to socialism. As they made the long return journey to Perth on the Trans Australian Railway at the end of the year, Hewett went into labour with her sixth child and the baby Rozanna was delivered in Kalgoorlie.

In Perth, Hewett completed her Arts degree and obtained a position as a university tutor in English at the UWA,which she held till 1973. She financially supported her family with some help from Lilley and her parents.

Hewett made a trip to a Weimar Writer’s Conference in 1965, and was treated for thrombosis in the Soviet Union. Here she became aware of the plight of dissident writers under the heavy censorship regime of the Soviet bloc. Hewett arranged protests on behalf of the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial in 1965, after which she became increasingly disillusioned with Communism. In 1967 her first full-scale play This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, which remains popular today. This would be her last work of socialist realism.

During the Prague Spring in 1968 she was a strong supporter of the moderate Czech regime. She and Lilley organised a protest march in Perth with students and the CPA. Although the CPA distanced itself from the Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia, Hewett subsequently left the Party along with many others. She was attacked by former friends who remained Stalinist hardliners.

Mature work

Hewett moved back to Sydney in 1973, and produced a number of poetry collections as well as plays, which were well-received and performed throughout Australia.

In 1975, she published a collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, which resulted in the pursuit of a libel (defamation) action by her ex-husband Lloyd Davies, who was a lawyer. His complaint was about a poem entitled "The Uninvited Guest". The lawsuit proved successful in 1976, and Davies then widened his charges, which prevented the productions or publication of two of her plays in Western Australia. The result was protested across the nation, with the South Australian Parliament (under the government of Don Dunstan) choosing to read the poem into its records.

After publishing her award-winning 1990 memoir Wild Card, Hewett published two novels and several collections of poetry, but her newer plays were not performed much at the time.

Later years

Hewett moved to Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, with her husband Merv Lilley in 1991. She suffered from osteoarthritis but continued to write prolifically, including a novel, Neap Tide (Penguin 1999), a collection of poetry, Halfway Up The Mountain, a play commissioned by the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne, Nowhere, and other unpublished works. At the time of her death she was working on the second volume of her autobiography, The Empty Room.

She died on 25 August 2002 in the Blue Mountains, of breast cancer.

Personal life

In June 2018, Hewett's daughters, Kate and Rozanna Lilley, alleged that they had been sexually assaulted as teenagers by writer and journalist Bob Ellis, artist Martin Sharp, and other men on several occasions, with their parents' knoweldge and tacit approval. They named four perpetrators in books published in 2018, who were dead by the time of publication, but also reaffirmed their ongoing love for their mother in their books. The abuse took place in a bohemian household that entertained some of the most well-known poets, artists, filmmakers, actors and theatre directors, and where sexual liberation was celebrated.

Recognition, awards, legacy

Dorthy Hewett Sydney Writers Walk plaque

Hewett has been called "one of Australia's best-loved and most respected writers".

  • 2000: Western Australian Writers Hall of Fame
  • 2015: Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript established by UWA Publishing in honour of Hewett, "as an outstanding writer who was born in this place and spent decades here as a writer, a university teacher, and a mentor to many"

In addition to the above personal awards and honours, many of Hewett's works have been shortlisted or won awards.

Works

In her lifetime Hewett had 22 plays performed, and she published nine collections of poetry, three novels and many other prose works. There have been four anthologies of her poetry.

Plays and music theatre

  • This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1967)
  • Mrs Porter and the Angel (1969)
  • The Chapel Perilous (1972) (first performed in late 1970)
  • Bon-Bons and Roses For Dolly (1972)
  • Catspaw (1974)
  • Joan (1975)
  • The Tatty Hollow Story (1976)
  • The Golden Oldies (1977)
  • Pandora's Cross (1978)
  • The Man From Mukinupin (1979)
  • Golden Valley (1981)
  • Song of the Seals (1983)
  • The Fields of Heaven (1983)
  • Christina's World (1983)
  • Me and the Man in the Moon (1987)
  • Nowhere (2001)
  • Jarrabin

Novels

  • Bobbin Up (1959)
  • The Toucher (1993)
  • Neap Tide (1999)

Poetry

  • What About the People! (1963) (with Merv Lilley)
  • The Hidden Journey (1967)
  • Windmill Country (1968)
  • Rapunzel in Suburbia (1975)
  • Greenhouse (1979)
  • Journeys (1982) (with Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood & Judith Wright)
  • Alice in Wormland (1987)
  • A Tremendous World in Her Head: Selected Poems (1989)
  • Selected Poems (1991)
  • Peninsula (1994)
  • Collected Poems: 1940–1995 (1996)
  • Wheatlands (2000) (with John Kinsella)
  • Halfway Up the Mountain (2001)
  • The Gypsy Dancer and Early Poems (2009)
  • Selected Poems (2010)

Footnotes

  1. Daily News 6 June 1945, preserving propriety, stated Dorothy was suffering from mumps and poisoned herself by accident.
  2. Rozanna Lilley (2018). Do Oysters Get Bored. UWA Publishing, p. 125. Hewett's grandson Nathaniel Cervas Flood also died of ALL in 2010, aged 7.
  3. Poem published in Tribune, 30 November 1960. See Mark Gregory (2009). Industrial song and folksong. Australian Folklore 24, pp. 91-96.
  4. Her 1967 poem ‘The Hidden Journey’ Overland 36, one of her best, describes her reservations lyrically and pointedly.
  5. Austlit finds 745 works by Hewett, 415 works about the author, and 27 awards.

References

  • Hewett, Dorothy (1990). Wild Card: an autobiography, 1923–1958. London, Virago, ISBN 1-85381-143-2.
  1. ^ "Dorothy Hewett". AustLit. 28 January 2015. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  2. ^ Flood, Joe (2013). "Dorothy Hewett and her forbears". Unravelling the Code: The Coads and Coodes of Cornwall and Devon. Melbourne: Deluge. pp. 362–369, 668–671. ISBN 9780992328108.
  3. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth. (2017). ‘Dorothy Hewett’, Chapter 6 in Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt. UWA Publishing.
  4. Hewett, Arthur Thomas. "The AIF Project". www.aif.adfa.edu.au.
  5. Wild Card, p.15.
  6. Dorothy Hewett (1933). “Dreaming”, Our Rural Magazine.
  7. Wild Card, pp. 25, 31, 50.
  8. Wild Card, p. 59.
  9. ^ Hunt, Lynne. "Hunt, L. & Trotman, J. (2002) Claremont Cameos. Edith Cowan University: Perth" – via www.academia.edu.
  10. Wild Card, p. 63.
  11. The West Australian 11 September 1941.
  12. The West Australian 22 August 1941, 5 September 1941, 4 July 1942, 16 November 1945.
  13. Justina Williams (1993). Anger and Love. Arts Centre Press. p.113.
  14. "Search". Trove.
  15. ‘Writes prize poem after breakdown.’ Daily News 31 May 1945.
  16. Wild Card, p.133.
  17. Hewett, Dorothy (December 1982). "The garden and the city". Westerly. 27: 99–104.
  18. ‘Black Swan’. The West Australian 26 July 1946, 22 Oct 1947.
  19. The Worker’s Star 31 Jan 1947.
  20. "Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod". unionsong.com.
  21. "Trove". trove.nla.gov.au.
  22. "Dorothy Hewett, interviewed by Terry Lane in 1978". AustLit.
  23. Susan McKernan (1989). A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War. Allen and Unwin.
  24. Stephen Knight, (1995). ‘Bobbin Up and the working class novel’, in Bennett, J (ed) (1995) Dorothy Hewett: Selected Critical Essays. Fremantle Arts Centre.
  25. Hewett, Dorothy. "Dorothy Hewett: two early essays [Eat Bread and Salt and Speak the Truth, and 'The Times They are a'Changin'". Hecate. 21 (2): 129–136. doi:10.3316/ielapa.960807540 – via search.informit.org (Atypon).
  26. "1950's 1960's - A History of International Women's Day". www.isis.aust.com.
  27. "Zora Simic". www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au.
  28. "John McLaren. A failed vison: Realist Writers' Groups in Australia 1945-65: the case of Overland" (PDF). vuir.vu.edu.au.
  29. "Bush Music Club Inc. - Australian folk music and dance". www.bushmusic.org.au.
  30. Fahey, Warren (17 September 2014). "Australian Folk Revival". Retrieved 15 March 2022.
  31. Denis Kevans. ‘These poems are big as life…’ Tribune, 4 December 1963. Review of Realist Writer edition 1963.
  32. "Sailor Home from the Sea (Cock of the North)". Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music. Retrieved 20 March 2022.
  33. "John Manifold | Mapping Brisbane History". mappingbrisbanehistory.com.au/.
  34. "The ballad of women / [Nance Macmillan and Dorothy Hewett] - Fryer Library Manuscripts". manuscripts.library.uq.edu.au.
  35. Poems in Tribune “To the Communists”, 19 September 1962 and ‘Three men’ 9 January 1965.
  36. Moore, Nicole; Spittel, Christina (2018). "Bobbin Up in the Leseland". In Kirkpatrick&Dixon (ed.). Republics of Letters: Literary Communities in Australia. Sydney University Press. pp. 123–124. ISBN 9781783085248.
  37. Roger Milliss (1968). ‘Review, Windmill Country. The odyssey of Dorothy Hewett’. Tribune 25 Sep 1968.
  38. Review Tribune 25 January 1967, p6
  39. "This Old Man Comes Rolling Home". UNSW Theatrical Society.
  40. "Protest cables from Perth". Tribune 11 September 1968.
  41. Williams, Victor (27 September 1967). "Anti-soviet propaganda". Tribune.
  42. ^ Moore, Nicole (1 August 2018). "Dorothy Hewett: 1923 – 2002". Search Foundation. Retrieved 11 April 2022. This bio is one of over 150 written for the Communist Biographies Project run by the SEARCH Foundation as part of our celebrations for the 2020 Centenary of the founding of the CPA
  43. Dimond, J.; Kirkpatrick, P. (2000). Literary Sydney: A Walking Guide. University of Queensland Press. p. 130. ISBN 978-0-7022-3150-6. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  44. Tozer, Kate; Colvin, Mark (26 August 2002). "PM - 26/08/2002: Dorothy Hewett passes away". ABC Radio National. PM. Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  45. ^ Birns, Nicholas; McNeer, Rebecca (2007). A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900. Camden House companion volumes. Camden House. pp. 321-. ISBN 978-1-57113-349-6. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  46. Nichols, Claire (21 June 2018). "Dorothy Hewett's daughters Rozanna and Kate Lilley talk about re-casting their mum's image in the age of #MeToo". ABC News. Radio National: The Hub on Books. Retrieved 19 June 2019.
  47. "Dorothy Coade Hewett". honours.pmc.gov.au. Retrieved 14 June 2019.
  48. "Archibald Prize Archibald 1990 work: Dorothy Hewett by Geoffrey Proud". Art Gallery of NSW. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  49. "The Chapel Perilous - A Reading Australia Information Trail". AustLit. 23 June 1927. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  50. Gorman, James (16 April 2014). "Circular Quay's Writers Walk plaques out of date for deceased Australian authors". The Daily Telegraph (Sydney). Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  51. "Public Place Names (Franklin) Determination 2007 (No 1)" (PDF). ACT Government. 2007. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  52. "Dorothy Hewett and the Dorothy Hewett Award". UWA Publishing. 14 June 2018. Retrieved 11 April 2022.
  53. Hewett, Dorothy (1976), This old man comes rolling home, Currency Press, ISBN 978-0-86937-049-0
  54. Mrs Porter and the Angel (18 May 1969 - 1 June 1969) [Event description], 1969, retrieved 20 August 2016
  55. Hewett, Dorothy (1900), Mrs. Porter and the angel : a modern fairytale in two acts, retrieved 20 August 2016
  56. Hewett, Dorothy (1972), The chapel perilous : (or, The perilous adventures of Sally Banner), Currency Press, ISBN 978-0-85893-008-7
  57. Hewett, Dorothy; Hewett, Dorothy, 1923-2002. Tatty Hollow story (1976), Bon-bons and roses for Dolly ; The Tatty Hollow story : two plays, Currency Press, ISBN 978-0-86937-047-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  58. Hewett, Dorothy (1900), Catspaw : a musical in two acts, retrieved 20 August 2016
  59. Hewett, Dorothy; Flynn, Patrick, 1936-2008 (1984), Joan, Yackandandah Playscripts, ISBN 978-0-86805-009-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)

Further reading

External links

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