|
a.
|
Note: orrespondence and later at Perth College and the University of Western Australia. She worked as a journalist on the Perth Daily News and the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star. She won a national radio prize for poetry at the age o
f 17. She rejected the lifestyle of her wealthy parents and joined the Communist Party.On the rebound from a failed wartime relationship, abortion and attempted suicide, she married the party lawyer Lloyd Davies. However she fell in love with the boilermaker Les Flood and eloped with him to Sydney several years later, where t
hey lived in poverty. In 1952 they went on a trade union delagation to Russia and China.She worked for one year as a mill hand and for two years as an advertising copywriter.. Unfortunately Les suffered from paranoid schitozophrenia and in 1958, shortly after writing her first novel Bobbin Up, she was forced to flee back to her parents with three small boys. Much of this is detailed in her acclaimed biography Wild Card, by the feminist publishers Virago. Both these works have been published in many languages and countries, and Bobbin Up is regarded as one of the
finest novels of its time and genre.In South Perth her parents built a home for her on the old tennis court at the back of their property. She trained in a teachers' college but was removed when they found she was divorced. She completed her degree and obtained a position as a university tutor which she held till 1972, and supported her family on this with some help from her parents. She arranged protests on behalf of dissident authors following several trips to Eastern Europe in the early 1960s, and left t
he Party following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.From this time on she concentrated on campus cultural affairs and began a career as a playwright in 1967. She encouraged and constructively criticised the work of young poets and her house became a meeting-place for many struggling poets a
nd writers, united by a common interest in poetry. She had many friends of different political persuasions.In 1972 following her tour-de-force Chapel Perilous, she received the first of many grants from the new Australia Literature Board, and she lived largely on these grants plus a bequest form her father for the rest of her life. In Sydney, she bought a rambling house in Woolahra witth the proceeds of her mother's estate and devoted herself entirely to literature and the arts. From that time she reverted to the style of her earlier lyrical romantic work, though with an increasingly heavy touch of irony and self-criticism. Younger poets including most of Australia's top young writers were now her friends. In collaboration with poets associated with the "Generation of '68" and New Poetry magazine, paticularly John
Tranter and Robert Adamson (with whom she maintained a close lifetiem friendship), her work became more sparse and directed and the romantic element more controlled.Since taking her first grant she published thirteen plays, nine poetry collections, an autobiography and a further two novels, and she has been regarded as one of the success stories of the system of government grants to literature. She was awarded an AM for services to Australian literature, a D.Litt. from the University of Western Australia, and a lifetime Emeritus Grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts. She has a "star" on the pavement in Circ ular Quay, Sydney. In 1990 a painting of Dorothy Hewett by friend and artist Geoffrey Proud won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most famous portrait prize. In public Dorothy was a great entertainer and a charismatic personality who was always surrounded by a circle of admirers and friends. In private she was rather shy but also immensely entertaining. Due to a series of illnesses she spent a g
ood deal of time after 1961 in her bed. She had extremely vivid dreams and the family would troop in to hear them recounted. Friends, journalists and others would also be received by Dorothy in her marvellous collection of nightdresses. She would move from near-inertness to creative bursts of highly directed writing activity - she wrote her first novel in eight weeks and re-constructed many of her plays on-the-fly in the theatre, in collaboration with well-known directors
and the actors.Dorothy's relationship with feminism was somewhat vexed. On the one hand she put forward vigorous positive images of women as actors in central stage, living life by their own rules. But because she came from a long line of powerful women who had always uncannily arranged their environments and their men to suit themselves, she was in the class of women who rarely perceive any problem with the women's role. Joy Hooton writes, "the final effect is not so much feminism as a rec
alcitrant female individualism"
http://www.vulgar.com.au/hollier.html A colleague writes "Dorothy was her own woman, someone who cannot be fitted into any neat category or label. He life and relationships were rambunctious and always pushed the outer limits, part of the unforgettable impacts she made on those
around her. I will remember particularly her generosity of spirit and enthusiasm in helping and inspiring a new generation of young writers". She spent her last years at the foot of the Blue Mountains outside Sydney with her husband, the writer Merv Lilley; and succumbed to recurring breast cancer .
http://www.vulgar.com.au/auhewett.html; http://www.trinity.wa.edu.au/plduffyrc/subjects/english/aust/hewett.htm
http://www.wordconstructions.com/hewett.htm
Wikipedia article is being corrected using the above: Joe Flood, eldest son of the author.
Note: Dorothy Coade Hewett, poet, playwright and novelist, is one of Australia's best known authors and a romantic feminist icon. She was born in 1923 in Perth, Western Australia, was brought up on an isolated sheep and wheat farm, educated by c
|
