Dorothy Coade Hewett

Dorothy Coade Hewett studied at University of Western Australia and Perth College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is poetry and play. Distinctions recorded are Christopher Brennan Award, Newcastle Poetry Prize and Member of the Order of Australia.

• Name — Dorothy Hewett • Birth Name — Dorothy Coade Hewett • Birthplace — Perth, Western Australia • Born — 21 May 1923 • Place of death — Springwood, New South Wales, Australia • Died — 25 August 2002 (aged 79) • Occupation — * Playwright • poet • author • Years Active — 1941–2002 • Children — 6 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.

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. Hewett's father survived the Gallipoli campaign and the Western Front in World War I, and he was twice decorated for bravery. • Illustration — Hewett and sister Lesley, Lambton Downs about 1930 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. In collaboration with poets associated with the "Generation of '68" and New Poetry magazine, particularly Robert Adamson (with whom she maintained a close lifetime friendship), her work became more sparse and directed and the romantic element more controlled. In 1981, after her children had left home, she moved to another large, semi-ruined terrace in the centre of Darlinghurst. In the 1980s, she published the poetry collections Alice in Wormland and Peninsula. The latter was written in Portsea, Melbourne, in a cottage "Imara" made available to writers by Neilma Gantner. A number of less-successful plays were trialled, sometimes in playhouses in country towns. Towards the end of her time in Darlinghurst, she wrote the first volume of her autobiography Wild Card, which covers the years 1923 to 1958. She completed the book during a trip to Oxford, England. Encouraged by its success, she continued with further works.

• Illustration — Dorothy Hewett, Merv Lilley, 2000 Hewett moved at the end of 1991 to an old coach house at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. She wrote two moderately successful novels, and a poetry collection Halfway Up the Mountain, but struggled to get new theatre work onto the stage until she wrote the successful play Nowhere, which was staged in 2001. She was disabled by osteoarthritis and was progressively reliant on a wheelchair and then bedridden. Her husband Lilley cared for her into his eighties. She died from recurring breast cancer on 25 August 2002. At the time of her death she was working on the second volume of her autobiography.

According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Hewett used "poetry, music and symbol to portray life's paradoxes and her characters' mingling of perception and delusion" while adding "her verse is confessional and romantic in theme, wryly humorous, frankly bawdy, varied in tone and rich in imagery". D'Aeth finds a "dizzying amplitude of styles in her work, beginning with modernism in her early poems through socialist realism to expressionist musical farce, followed by a late response to American poetic experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s", citing her trademark "vivid phantasmagoria and baroque larrikin humour". Even a single play like The Chapel Perilous employs tragedy, farce, naturalism, Brechtian expressionism and musical comedy in quick succession. In fact, Hewett paid scant attention to convention or literary fashion, following her own muse on topics she believed were important. Even during her Realist Writer period, her works were much more passionate and dramatic than was normal for the socialist realism genre. She and Alma De Groen were almost the only female playwrights during the Australian drama renaissance of the 1970s. When most plays of the time were naturalistic along the style of TV dramas, Hewett's plays incorporated allusion, mystery, landscape, poetry, songs and music, with lashings of ironic humour that saved her characters from excessive posturing. Much of her work was autobiographical and intensely personal, and several works were set in her childhood dreamscape of wheatbelt Western Australia. Hewett worked directly with most of the major directors and actors of the time, and was her own dramaturg during first-time performances. Female actors particularly appreciated the strong roles they were given in Hewett's plays. Various musicians have set Hewett's words to music. Weevils in the Flour has been recorded six times, most notably by Declan Affley and The Bushwackers. Robyn Archer recorded a rock version of Hewett's poem In Moncur Street. A number of composers worked with Hewett on music for her plays, notably Jim Cotter and Patrick Flynn. While the lyrics in the plays were published with the text, unfortunately the music was never published or recorded, so it usually had to be re-composed for any subsequent staging. She was appointed as Writer in Residence in eight Australian universities and one in the USA between 1975 and 1990, where she participated fully in university life, giving encouragement to younger writers. Her very late emergence as a major figure prevented her travelling abroad to publicise her work to any extent. Bobbin Up was published throughout Europe and therefore is well known internationally. However, with the exception of The Man from Mukinupin, which was staged in London, her plays never found their way outside Australia.

For much of her life after 1960, Hewett struggled with ill-health, apart from a very active period in the 1970s. She had thrombosis from 1965. Her ongoing gastric trouble and a slipped retina were corrected by surgery in 1971–72. Progressive osteoarthritis restricted her mobility from the late 1970s, and many of her later works were written in bed, where she also received visitors. The necessity to support a large family was also a major limitation on her activity. She only became a full-time writer from the age of 51, with the aid of Literature Board grants, intermittent earnings from writing and from university fellowships, and an ongoing bequest from her father's estate.

Her early romantic involvements, her attempted suicide and her membership of the CPA greatly distressed her parents and grandparents. On the other hand, when she left the CPA she was strongly attacked by hard-line Communist colleagues, though the Party always claimed her as their own. Padraic McGuiness attacked her as a former Communist immediately after her death. The subject matter and language of her plays could be shocking to members of her audience. The publisher sent warnings to school librarians to return Chapel Perilous if necessary, and most of them did. Women rushed out of a performance of Bonbons and Roses in tears when menstruation took place on stage, and flowers were placed in the theatre toilets in protest. Mixed reviews and modest box office takings caused the hyped musical Pandora's Cross to shoulder part of the blame for the failure of the new Paris Theatre company in 1978. Hewett's characters and locations often derived from real life but could sometimes be too thinly disguised. In 1977, her first husband Lloyd Davies sued her for libel for a poem "The Uninvited Guest" – possibly the first time someone has been sued for a poem. The action was protested across the nation, with the South Australian Parliament choosing to read the poem into its records. Several fundraising events opposing censorship were held to help defray the legal defence costs, and Bob Hudson recorded a satirical song "Libel" to assist. The matter was settled out-of-court, the book was recalled and the offending poem was removed. The plays The Chapel Perilous and The Tatty Hollow Story, which contained unflattering depictions of a Davies-like character, could not be shown in Perth. Davies subsequently wrote a rambling defence of his lawsuit and conducted a lecture tour in support. Hewett was outspoken in defence of Australian literature, especially in her later years. In 2000 Hewett launched a broadside at lack of support for writers by publishing houses and governments, saying independent publishing houses were being taken over by big overseas companies, that the price of books was rising, and only generous public funding would enable experimental writing and young, unknown writers to find a place. In 2018, fifteen years after her death, Hewett's two daughters appeared on the front page of The Australian, and in other media interviews. The women stated that they had been very sexually active as teenagers in the 1970s, with their parents' knowledge and tacit approval. Some of their sexual activity had been conducted with adult visitors to Woollahra, specifically naming the political writer Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and other deceased celebrities. Kate Lilley asserted that on several occasions, sex with unnamed men had not been consensual. The two women believed their mother had not ensured their safety. The accusations were not confirmed and no charges were laid. A media frenzy ensued, in which the tabloid press attacked "paedophile rings", the libertarian 1970s, Hewett's lapsed Communism, and Ellis in particular, who was detested by conservatives. The Australian Senate passed a motion raised by Senator Cory Bernardi, calling for renaming of the Dorothy Hewett Award at the University of Western Australia. The university did not comply.

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.

• Ballad of Women (with Nance Macmillan) (1961) • This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (Sydney: Currency Press, 1967) • Mrs Porter and the Angel (1969) • The Chapel Perilous (Sydney: Currency Press, 1972) (first performed in January 1971) • Bon-Bons and Roses For Dolly (Sydney: Currency Press, 1972) • Catspaw (1974) • The Knight of the Long Knives (1975) • Miss Hewett's Shenanigans (1975) • The Beautiful Miss Portland (1976) • The Tatty Hollow Story (Sydney: Currency Press; London, Eyre Methuen, 1976) (written in 1974) • The Golden Oldies (Sydney: Currency Press, 1977) • Pandora's Cross (Budapest: Centre hongrois de l'I.I.T., 1978) • The Man From Mukinupin (Fremantle Arts Centre Press; Sydney: Currency Press, 1980) • Susannah's Dreaming (1980) • The Fields of Heaven (1982) • Christina's World (1983) (Operetta) • Joan (Montmorency, Victoria: Yackandandah Playscripts, 1984) (performed in 1975) • Golden Valley (Paddington, N.S.W.: Currency Press, 1985) (performed in 1981) • Song of the Seals (Sydney: Currency Press, 1985) • Me and the Man in the Moon (1987) • The Rising of Pete Marsh (1988) • Zoo (1991) (with Robert Adamson) • Zimmer: A Mock Opera in Two Acts (1993) (with Robert Adamson) • Jarrabin trilogy (1996) • Nowhere (Strawberry Hills, N.S.W.: Currency Press, 2001)

• What About the People! ([Sydney]: National Council of the Realist Writer Groups, 1962) (with Merv Lilley) • The Hidden Journey (Newnham: Wattle Grove Press, 1967) • Windmill Country (Melbourne: Peter Leyden Publishing House, 1968) • Rapunzel in Suburbia (Sydney: Prism Books, 1975) • Greenhouse (1979) • Journeys (1982) (with Rosemary Dobson, Gwen Harwood & Judith Wright) • Alice in Wormland (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1990) • Peninsula (South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994) • Wheatlands (South Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000) (with John Kinsella) • Halfway Up the Mountain (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001) • The Gypsy Dancer and Early Poems (Sydney: Juvenilia Press, 2009)

• A Tremendous World in Her Head: Selected Poems (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1989) • Selected Poems, edited by Edna Longley (South Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991) • Collected Poems 1940–1995, edited by William Gronow (South Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1996) • Selected Poems, edited by Kate Lilley (Crawley, W.A.: UWA Publishing, 2010)

• |Title — |Year — |First published — |Reprinted/collected in • "The Witnesses" — 1968 — Meanjin Quarterly vol. 27 no. 4 Summer 1968 — Rapunzel in Suburbia, Prism, 1975, p33

• Bobbin Up (Melbourne, Victoria: Australasian Book Society, 1959) • The Toucher (Ringwood, Victoria: McPhee Gribble, 1994) • Neap Tide (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books, 1999)

• Wild Card: An Autobiography, 1923–1958 (London: Virago Press, 1990) • A Baker's Dozen (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 2001) • Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett, edited by Fiona Morrison (Crawley, Western Australia: UWA Publishing, 2011)

The authorities additionally record the heading Dorothy Hewett. Her recorded language was English. 2 children are recorded: Tom Flood and Kate Lilley.

Dorothy Coade Hewett is recorded as having received Christopher Brennan Award, Newcastle Poetry Prize and Member of the Order of Australia.