Dorothy Hewett plays a vital role in 20h-century Australian literary history. Her poems, plays, novels, stories and the autobiographical Wild Card prove her to be a romantic for all seasons.
Born in Perth, Western Australia, in 1923, Dorothy Hewett lived until she was 12 on a 3,000-acre wheat and sheep farm near Wickepin in the Great Southern region of Western Australia. Her remembered rural childhood forms a central motif of her writings, early and late. It is a Garden of Eden where "the black snakes wait and slide".
Tom Hewett, her father, had taken up farming after returning from the Western Front as a war hero with a DCM and Belgian Croix de Guerre. He remained a powerful figure in his daughter's imagination and was perhaps the main source of her tendency to hero-worship working men with a wild side. Her relationship with her mother, René Hewett (née Coade), was more fractious. In Wild Card (1990) Hewett wrote that the struggle to come to terms with her mother dominated most of her life. She felt programmed to play out her mother's "romantic non-cautionary side".
Dorothy and her younger sister Lesley (nicknamed Dessie) shared an education by correspondence under their mother's direction. The sisters wandered the farm's creekbeds, riding horses, daydreaming, reading, talking, inventing games. Hewett immersed herself from an early age in Gothic romance, Australian ballads, the British Romantics and Tennyson. She dreamt of being a famous actress and writer.
Hewett's secondary schooling in the 1930s at Perth College, which was run by Anglican nuns, provided a partial basis for her controversial 1971 expressionist play The Chapel Perilous. Sally Banner, the play's semi-autobiographical heroine, rebels against the authority figures of parents, teachers and the Church. Sally's candour is luminous, if naïve. She seeks to "walk naked through the world" carrying truth, beauty and freedom with her.
During her first year at the University of Western Australia in 1941, Hewett wrote in her diary, "Live wildly today, forget tomorrow." She expounded pacifist and atheistic views, joined the Communist Party and poisoned herself with a household antiseptic when she was jilted by an air-force lover. Thereafter, she embarked on a life of sexual promiscuity, as a means of revenge on her parents and on her idealised concept of perfect love – "Heathcliff and Cathy, and the sentimental love songs on the radio".
Hewett was an uneasy comrade for Communists and feminists. Both movements courted her, as did other progressivist causes, but her highly developed bullshit detector and outspoken candour meant that she always remained a potential anarchist in their ranks. She travelled to the Soviet Union and China as an Australian Communist writer. Her last campaign within the Party was for the release of the dissident writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. She criticised her fellow West Australian Communist writer Katharine Susannah Prichard for sacrificing her heart to a stone.
Dorothy Hewett's erotic adventures attracted wide publicity in her lifetime. Like Byron, her least favourite romantic (because she found his irony condescending), she was often presented as a libertine, but this is misleading. Her affections were intuitive and spontaneous but they ran deep. Nevertheless, she was accident-prone in love. Her first marriage in Perth in 1945 to a Communist lawyer, Lloyd Davies, ended in divorce. Later, Davies brought a series of actions against Hewett for alleged defamation.
Hewett's second extended relationship was with a Sydney boilermaker, Les Flood. She lived unmarried to Flood in the working-class suburbs of Redfern, Rosebery and Rockdale from 1949 to 1958, and bore him three sons. Her socialist realist novel Bobbin Up (1959) was written from this experience, especially from a stint working at the Alexandria textile mills. She escaped dramatically and returned to Perth in 1958 when Flood's paranoid schizophrenia took a threatening turn.
Hewett's third attempt at a long-term relationship was more successful. In 1960 she married Merv Lilley, a Queensland canecutter, drover, miner and seaman who was also a poet and Communist. The tall, muscular sailor and his blonde wife became a focal point for writers, students and literati at their home in South Perth through the 1960s and early 1970s in what Lilley called "the backyards of the bourgeoisie". Their jointly authored book of poems What About the People! (1963) contains some of Hewett's most stirring ballads and lyrics. They had two daughters. Lilley's 44-year relationship to Hewett survived: he was Dorothy's devoted carer and loving husband in the last decade of her life when osteoarthritis and obesity greatly reduced her mobility.
A great second flowering of Hewett's work occurred from her early fifties, when she, Lilley, their daughters Katie and Rosie and son Tom Flood moved to Sydney in 1974. On writers' grants from the newly formed Literature Board of the Australia Council she wrote plays, poems, novels and stories. She became close to a group of younger neo-romantic poets, especially Robert Adamson, editor of New Poetry. She jointly authored a book of poems, Wheatlands (2000), with John Kinsella, one of her greatest admirers.
Her last play, Nowhere, was composed from her bed in three days – with "the brush of angel's wings", she said – and produced by the Playbox Theatre in Melbourne in 2001. She learnt at this time that a breast cancer had recurred, yet she struggled to write more. Like Sally Banner, she had "a tremendous world in her head" and she knew that three-quarters of it would be buried with her.
Some will be relieved that a second volume of autobiography remained unfinished. Authority figures, especially prime ministers of a conservative cast, have felt the lash of her critical wit. Paul Keating, the mercurial Labor proponent of an Australian republic and a better deal for Aborigines, was a fellow spirit and awarded her a "Keating" fellowship.
Dorothy Hewett's burial ceremony at Springwood Bushland Cemetery in the Blue Mountains on Friday was proudly atheistic, as she had wished. Workers' songs, poems and Ella Fitzgerald's "Stormy Weather" wafted through the bushland. The crows came in on cue. One of Hewett's five children was heard to remark, "That's got to be Dorothy, come to see we do it right." The hulking frame of her husband helped to carry her coffin to the grave and he read the grimly memorable Wordsworthian lines that his wife had chosen for her tombstone:
IN THE SUMMER of 1961 I first crossed the Queensland border. It was like an entry into another country -- the wooden houses balanced on stilts, the lush tropical foliage, even the bird calls were unrecognisable. The men were big and beefy and the accent was a slow drawl. The ocean was warm, the air heavy, the smells damp. Cane toads squelched underfoot, green ants dropped from bushes and stung like fire, and all the flowers in the vases were artificial. How to contain such a strange, large multitudinous country, but this new anthology of Queensland poetry, covering half a century, proves that it can be done.
I have brought red roses and blue irises, Dorothy is in black with leopard-skin cuffs and collar, as doesn't befit a shopkeeper's daughter, looking fit but wary, prepared to be welcoming. I meet her husband Merv Lilley on the way in and he is as laconic as the occasion requires (that is, says almost nothing to me but points out the way). I sit down, and Dorothy says "I don't know what we're going to talk about -- I seem to have talked about everything in my life a thousand fucking times."
Oliver Sacks & Farewell to Dorothy Hewitt Sunday 1 September 2002 By way of tribute to Dorothy Hewitt, who died this week, we revisit an interview that Ramona Koval recorded with the writer in 1997 on the occasion of her seventy-fourth birthday. Also, Oliver Sacks at the Melbourne Writers' Festival, reading from his book Uncle Tungsten, and poetry from Dorothy Porter and Les Murray.
Dorothy Hewett, the "grande dame of Australian literature", enjoyed being known as "patron saint" of Varuna - The Writers' House, Katoomba in her beloved Blue Mountains.
As an avowed atheist, one-time communist and someone who, as a child, her Catholic nun charges were apt to inform would never go to heaven, Hewett revelled in the delicious irony of a saintly epithet.
Yesterday morning, Australian literature lost, if not one of its saints, than one of its most cherished larrikins, when Hewett, poet, playwright and novelist, died aged 79.
A Western Australian who lived for many years in the Blue Mountains, Hewett died at Springwood Hospital after battling breast cancer, leaving the second volume of her autobiography, the sequel to Wild Card, unfinished.
Peter Bishop, director of Varuna, said that while Dorothy Hewett will be remembered for her versatility across the literary spectrum, she once confided her favourite genre.
"She always thought of herself as a poet," Mr Bishop said. "She was a strong and passionate presence on the Australian literary scene. She was a great female writer and a great champion of female writing. Her real voice is to be found in her poetry."
Mr Bishop said a memorial to Hewett - who regularly visited Varuna even in her difficult twilight years when she would do readings of her work - will be established as soon as possible.
The Premier, Bob Carr, yesterday described Hewett as "an authentic working-class voice", while editor and critic Peter Craven said that Hewett was "an immensely colourful figure" who had left her mark on a variety of genres.
She is survived by husband, Merv Lilley, children, Kate and Rosie and, from her relationship with the late Les Flood, sons Joe, Michael and Tom. A service is expected to be held in the Blue Mountains..
For the last ten years of her life Dorothy Hewett was closely associated with Varuna, The Writers' House, at Katoomba.
She was the principal speaker both at its inauguration in 1991 and at its tenth birthday celebration in 2001. So it was entirely fitting that her funeral service and wake should take place in the Varuna gardens, on the first real afternoon of spring, with the tips of the Canadian maple showing delicate red against the blue sky.
Almost 200 came to Varuna to farewell one of Australia's greatest writers and most loved personalities.
A moving succession of speeches from Dorothy's family, friends and associates confirmed that Dorothy had lived her life with abundant generosity and passion, and that the legacy she left was great indeed. As one of her characters says so exultantly, she carried a tremendous world in her head, and even in her difficult last years that tremendousness did not diminish. Her final collection of poems, Halfway Up The Mountain, poems of the greatest courage, honesty and clarity, is one of her supreme achievements.
Dorothy Hewett lived in the Blue Mountains for the last decade of her life. Her generosity, humour, wisdom and exultant sense of adventure will be sadly missed in the Blue Mountains community and especially by the literary community link
Dorothy Hewett: poet, playwright, novelist and bohemian, 1923 - 2002
Dorothy Hewett, who has died aged 79, was a writer who emerged from Wild Card, her autobiography, as a kind of untamed earth mother with total recall. She was sensual, passionate, battered and quite undefeated.
There was much to be remembered in this work: two husbands, six children, multitudinous lovers, communism, violence, madness, death - as well as an unbridled rage to live. Searing grief was mixed with much pulsating, small-screen drama.
And remarkably, after all this turbulence, the year on the final page was only 1959. Hewett was a still youthful 35. The years that followed, filled with many more adventures - romantic, literary and political - made Dorothy Hewett one of Australia's most instantly recognisable writers.
The novelist Rosie Scott, a long-time friend, said: "Dorothy was one of the most inspirational women I know. A great writer and poet with a lifelong commitment to her craft, she never lost her passion for social justice or her courage in supporting left-wing causes. Her sardonic irreverence, intellect, honesty, warm heart, her encyclopedic knowledge of Australian literature and history were some of the qualities that made her a formidable friend, a wonderfully talented writer and a great Australian."
Ian Syson, editor of the left-wing literary magazine Overland, recently said Hewett was "Australia's finest living writer as a playwright and a novelist". He said he admired "her nose-thumbing, her complete disregard for the mores that prevented others from saying things, and her political commitment".
Hewett intrigued and sometimes disturbed audiences with such controversial plays as This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1964), The Chapel Perilous (1971), Pandora's Cross (1975) and The Man From Mukinupin (1979). In all, she wrote 22 plays, eight books of poems and three novels as well as Wild Card, the first part of a projected two-volume autobiography.
Last year she published a volume of poems, Halfway Up the Mountain, and a story collection, A Baker's Dozen, and a new play, Nowhere, was performed by Melbourne's Playbox Theatre.
Yet it was not least her persona as an unrepentant rebel, a somewhat dated but always beguiling reminder of a vanished bohemia, that commanded attention. Her appearance helped.
Hewett carried into old age - along with severe arthritis and excessive weight - some indestructible reminders of her early vivacious beauty. She wore flowing gowns. Her hair cascaded. Reclining on a divan she delighted in reliving with visitors the high - and appallingly low - points of a truly extra- ordinary life.
As a dramatist, Hewett achieved fame with relatively little acclaim. Her plays were sometimes the occasions for protest as well as applause.
Indeed, at the opening of Bon-Bons and Roses for Dolly in Perth demonstrators paraded with banners. Abusive letters were sent to the play's director. Later, in an emotional reaction to Graeme Blundell's production of The Golden Oldies in Melbourne, a stream of women, mostly middle-aged, left the theatre sobbing.
Some authorities thought her plays too poetic; some actors believed, simply, that they were "unplayable". Yet others were quick to declare that they found a feisty, exuberant lyricism in her language. When her semi-autobiographical play, The Chapel Perilous, was first published a warning was sent to schools that it might be found offensive and it urged caution before placing it on library shelves. But perceptions changed. Ten years later the play was on the school syllabus.
The Jarabbin Trilogy - "my last statements about country towns" - which Hewett wrote in the 1990s for the Melbourne Theatre Company and Perth's Black Swan Theatre, was judged too difficult and too expensive to stage. Aubrey Mellor commissioned and produced Nowhere for the Playbox when Hewett had become convinced she was "a forgotten woman" in the theatre.
"We still haven't found a way to do her plays", said Mellor but praised them as "poetic epics" written with "a perceptive yet uncritical eye". The critic and publisher, Katharine Brisbane, was emphatic. "I have no doubt that Dorothy Hewett's work will last," she wrote.
Yet few theatrical productions could have matched Hewett's real-life drama. She was born into a farming family in the West Australian wheat belt. She was established as a poet by the 1940s but before starting to write full-time, she worked as a millhand, a journalist and an advertising copywriter. In Perth, as a member of the Communist Party, she fought for women's rights. At 22 she attempted suicide after failed love affairs.
Later, married to a lawyer, Lloyd Davies, she left husband and child for a fellow communist, boilermaker Les Flood. Davies later sued her over a poem about his second wife and had the book in which it appeared banned from Western Australia.
In Sydney Hewett entered the obsessive world of the Communist Party, bore three sons with Flood, was bashed, arrested, organised strikes and watched her lover go mad with schizoid paranoia.
She returned to Perth, completed her degree, taught English at the University of Western Australia and married, for the second time, a former merchant seaman, Merv Lilley, who fathered her two daughters and with her encouragement also became a writer.
Back in Sydney, she rejected communism - over the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia - and resumed writing. In her last years she and Lilley moved to Faulconbridge, in the Blue Mountains.
Among her many awards were AWGIES for best play with Bon-Bons and Roses for Dolly in 1974 and for best children's play with Golden Valley in 1982; the Grace Levin Poetry Prize for A Tremendous World in Her Head in 1986 and in the same year an AM for services to Australian literature; the non-fiction prize in the 1991 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards for Wild Card; in 1996 the Christopher Brennan Poetry Award and West Australian Premier's Poetry prize for Collected Poems; and a special award in the 2000 NSW Premier's Literary Awards.
A portrait of Hewett, a bold work by Geoffrey Proud, won the 1986 Archibald Prize. She was proud that her novelist son, Tom Flood, won the 1991 Miles Franklin Award.
Hewett's later writing was accomplished while she battled crippling infirmities. Even in Halfway Up the Mountain, she wrote: "Four generations sat here yesterday/while I felt strangely distant/as if I had already taken an indefinite departure ..."
She died at Springwood Hospital of breast cancer and was still hoping to go home and finish writing the second volume of her autobiography, which she had titled The Empty Room.
In the latest issue of Overland, Lilley wrote of their 42-year marriage, her illness and his efforts at "trying to return this writer to the fold of words ...".
Hewett is survived by her husband, her five children - Joe, Michael and Tom Flood, Kate and Rosie Lilley - and seven grandchildren and one great grandchild. "Old age, I hate it," she said once, looking back. "Oh, I've had some good times ... But no, I'm not happy now because life didn't turn out to be as marvellous as I thought it would."
James Cunningham and Susan Wyndham
The heart and soul of a nation's literature
Poet John Kinsella writes: Dorothy Hewett is one of the centres of my life. I knew of her when I was child - she taught my mother at the University of Western Australia.
My mother recalls Dorothy as the teacher who worked against convention, though with a brilliant and inspired understanding of literature. She seems always to have had that knack of inspiring others, especially younger women.
Dorothy and I shared rural and urban backgrounds and both knew intimately the psychology and geography of the West Australian central wheat belt.
Dorothy was also the figure who managed to "break free", to create a literary and cultural life outside of her home place. In many ways, I followed her in this. She also demonstrated that a political outlook could become part of a literature and that the two didn't have to be in conflict.
Hewett's writing is about freedom and equality, linked with a deep respect for the vagaries of the individual. She told me that while she wasn't entirely sure about my wanderings in the field of experimental poetry, she could understand the need to look, to test. "I do that too, in different ways," she said.
And she did. Her plays are full of poetry and song, full of myth and realism, politics and literature. They carry the bizarre and the ordinary, celebration and examination. Hewett was also deeply concerned with the issues of indigenous Australia. Her life's work carries a growing awareness and confrontation with the complexities of non-indigenous presence in the landscape.
After the launch of her autobiographical Wild Card, Dorothy, her husband Merv, Labor frontbencher Carmen Lawrence (who had launched the book) and a group of poets and academics went to a local restaurant for a celebration dinner. Two of the younger poets - Anthony Lawrence and I - became somewhat vocal.
Things got fairly rowdy and Dorothy leant across and whispered in my ear, "It should be like this ..." She smiled her enchanting smile, with that almost-wicked sparkle in her eye that said: young poets are meant to misbehave. Dorothy liked bad boys.
I'd first met Dorothy by tracking her down in Sydney in my late teens. I was drunk and crazy; she cradled my head in the back of a car driving through Darlinghurst and said: "Don't worry, it always comes to this." At once nurturing and risque. As with many others, I realised that I loved her, and always would.
My favourite story concerns some translations of Dorothy's poems for the journal of the Swedish Academy, Artes. Working with two of the Artes' editors, I received a message via them from their translator, saying that Dorothy's were the most remarkable and unique poems he had ever translated and that if justice were to be done, she would be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature immediately.
I mentioned this to Dorothy and that twinkle appeared in her eye: "John, they'd never give me that, I just don't fit the picture." It's a picture they should adjust, because Dorothy's is the heart and soul of literature and if there is such a thing as a great national writer, without subscribing to the parochialisms and narrowness that come with nationalism, it is Dorothy Hewett.
Hewett buried - God not invited By Susan Wyndham August 31 2002
"We've got to keep God out of it," said Merv Lilley as he planned a funeral for his wife of 44 years, Dorothy Hewett, the writer, atheist and former communist who died last Sunday in the Blue Mountains.
And so her burial was held yesterday under a turpentine tree at Springwood Bushland Cemetery with no religious ceremony. Instead, Ella Fitzgerald sang Stormy Weather and Hewett's family read poems.
A crowd of 200 friends from the worlds of literature, theatre and politics celebrated her 79 years of life with poetry, songs and memories in the garden at Varuna, the Katoomba literary centre Hewett opened in 1991 and where her last book of poems, Halfway Up the Mountain, was launched last year.
Theatre directors Aubrey Mellor and John Clarke, poets Peter Minter, Robert Adamson and Nicolette Stasko, playwright Alma de Groen and the ubiquitous Bob Ellis were all there.
"I know Mum's out there driving at breakneck speed in her red Ferrari," said her daughter Rosie Lilley, recalling how the free-spirited Hewett had resented the osteoarthritis that stopped her from driving and even walking. Only her imagination enabled her to survive confinement. On the frequent trips she made to hospital in her last years she refused an ambulance and insisted on going in her husband's hearse-like black Ford LTD.
Four of Hewett's five children were present (the fifth, Michael, like his mother, does not believe in the rituals of death) as well as grandchildren and a great-grandchild. Car breakdowns featured in their memories of Hewett-led trips back and forth between Perth and Sydney across the Nullabor Plain.
Novelist Rosie Scott remembered Hewett for her vast literary output - "she's part of the Australian canon" - and for her wild spirit, her "allergy to phoneyness" and the loving nature "under all that huge intellect and sardonic wit".
Poet John Tranter once asked her why she had joined the Communist Party, which she later rejected. She answered: " There was this young man I was keen on and he invited me to a party." She went along in a red dress and lipstick and was surprised to hear men talking about Karl Marx.
"She was the best companion in childhood you could ever imagine," her sister, Dessie Dougan, recalled, picturing their games in the paddocks of Western Australia, where the young Hewett would come up with poems and force Dessie to remember them until they got home.
Many people remembered and quoted her poems yesterday. "You can never go back, only onwards," went one line by the indomitable fighter, who leaves behind unfinished a second volume of autobiography - mercifully, say some, given what it might tell.
Katherine Brisbane, the publisher of Hewett's plays, quoted from one of her best known, The Chapel Perilous: "I had a wonderful world in my head and three-quarters of it will be buried with me."
