Dorothy Coade Hewett (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002) was an Australian playwright, poet and author. She wrote in a number of 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 other prose works. There have been four anthologies of her poetry.
Early life and education 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 2,000 prime acres had been taken by her maternal grandparents in 1912 at Malyalling near Wickepin, 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.Tony Hughes-d'Aeth. (2017). 'Dorothy Hewett', Chapter 6 in Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt. UWA Publishing. 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 until 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.Dorothy Hewett (1933). "Dreaming", Our Rural Magazine. On annual trips to Perth, Hewett became entranced with the theatre and the world of Hollywood. Her mother had severe early-onset menopause symptoms and beat the wilful and imaginative young Hewett.Wild Card, pp. 25, 31, 50.
The family moved to Perth in 1935 where they opened the Regal Theatre in Subiaco. Hewett attended Perth College, where she had to wear shoes, hat and gloves for the first time, a shock after her ragamuffin life on the farm.Wild Card, p. 59. 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.Wild Card, p. 63.
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.The West Australian 22 August 1941, 5 September 1941, 4 July 1942, 16 November 1945. 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 to 1947. 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.Wild Card, p. 133.
After World War II, she briefly re-enrolled at University of Western Australia 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.'Black Swan'. The West Australian 26 July 1946, 22 Oct 1947. 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 then 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 restart at the bottom, selling the Communist weekly paper Tribune on the street, 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 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.
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.Susan McKernan (1989). A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years after the War. Allen and Unwin. 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 had 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, and then with Leyden Publishing. In 1958, as Flood became increasingly violent and dangerous, she fled back to her parents in Western Australia 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.Poems in Tribune "To the Communists", 19 September 1962 and 'Three men' 9 January 1963. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article236853283 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 University of Western Australia, which she held until 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, she wrote 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 In 1968, her first volume of verse Windmill Country was published, including all her best poems up to that time.
Concerned about critical comments that her first play was dated, she wrote an overtly outré play, the "savage but hilarious attack on academic suburbia" Mrs Porter and the Angel. It caricatured members of the UWA English department, so the play was unable to be staged in Perth for fear of defamation proceedings, and it was first performed at the PACT Theatre in Sydney in May 1969.
She continued with a series of expressionist plays. At the end of 1970, her tour-de-force play The Chapel Perilous was staged in Perth. The self-parodying hero, Sally Banner, resonated with the emerging feminist movement and ensured Hewett's lasting fame. She followed it in 1972 with Bonbons and Roses for Dolly, a musical play about failed dreams set in an idealised Regal Theatre.
In 1973, Hewett received the first of eight grants from the new Literature Board of the Australia Council. She was over 50 years old when she was at last enabled to become a full-time professional writer.
She returned in late 1973 to her "city of marvellous experience" Sydney, where she bought a rambling terrace in Woollahra with her share of her recently deceased mother's estate. Here she enjoyed her most productive years, creating in quick succession: The Tatty Hollow Story (a woman who cannot be defined by her former lovers); The Golden Oldies (for two actors and two dummies); the opera extravaganza Joan (her only work set outside of Australia, with 75 actors and 40 musicians); the show musical Pandora's Cross; the rock opera Catspaw; The Fields of Heaven for the Festival of Perth; and two books of poetry Rapunzel in Suburbia and Greenhouse. In 1977 she wrote her most popular play The Man from Mukinupin.