Hewett, Dorothy (Coade)
HEWETT, Dorothy (Coade)
Nationality: Australian. Born: Perth, Western Australia, 21 May 1923. Education: Perth College; University of Western Australia, Perth, 1941–42, 1959–63, B.A. 1961. Family: Married 1) Lloyd Davies in 1944 (marriage dissolved 1949), one son (deceased); 2) lived with Les Flood, 1949–58, three sons; 3) married Merv Lilley in 1960, two daughters. Career: Millworker, 1950–52; advertising copywriter, Sydney, 1956–58; senior tutor in English, University of Western Australia, 1964–73. Writer-in-residence, Monash University, Melbourne, 1975, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, 1977, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, 1980, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Victoria, 1981, Magpie Theatre Company, Adelaide, 1982, Rollins College, Florida, 1988, and Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, 1990. Member of the editorial board, Westerly magazine, Nedlands, Western Australia, 1972–73, and Overland magazine, Melbourne, since 1970. Member of the Communist Party, 1943–68. Awards: Australian Broadcasting Commission prize, 1945, 1965; Australia Council grant, 1973, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985; Australian Writers Guild award, 1974, 1982; International Women's Year grant, 1976; Nettie Palmer award for nonfiction, 1991; Australian Artists Creative fellowship, 1993; Poetry award, National Book Council, Australia, 1994; Western Australia Premier's awards, 1994, 1996; Christopher Brennan award, 1996; Lifetime Emeritus grant, Australia Council, 1997. D.Litt.: University of Western Australia, 1995. A.O. (Member, Order of Australia), 1986. Agent: Hilary Linstead and Associates, Suite 302, "Easts Tower," 9–13 Bronte Road, Bondi Junction, New South Wales 2022. Address: 496 Great Western Highway, Faulconbridge, New South Wales, 2776, Australia.
Publications
Poetry
What about the People, with Merv Lilley. Sydney, Realist Writers, 1962.
Windmill Country. Sydney, Edwards and Shaw, 1968.
The Hidden Journey. Newnham, Tasmania, Wattle Grove Press, 1969.
Late Night Bulletin. Newnham, Tasmania, Wattle Grove Press, 1970.
Rapunzel in Suburbia. Sydney, New Poetry, 1975.
Greenhouse. Sydney, Big Smoke, 1979.
Journeys, with others, edited by Fay Zwicky. Melbourne, Sisters, 1982.
Alice in Wormland. Paddington, New South Wales, Paper Bark Press, 1987; as Alice in Wormland: Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1990.
A Tremendous World in Her Head: Selected Poems. Sydney, Dangaroo Press, 1989.
Selected Poems. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1990; South Fremantle, Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1991.
Peninsula. South Fremantle, Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1994.
Collected Poems, 1940–1995. South Fremantle, Western Australia, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995.
Neap Tide. Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin, 1999.
Plays
Time Flits Away, Lady (produced 1941).
This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (produced Perth, 1966; revised version produced Sydney, 1968). Sydney, Currency Press, 1976.
Mrs. Porter and the Angel (produced Sydney, 1969).
The Chapel Perilous; or, The Perilous Adventures of Sally Banner, music by Frank Amdt and Michael Leyden (produced Perth, 1971). Sydney, Currency Press, 1972; London, Eyre Methuen, 1974.
Bon-Bons and Roses for Dolly (produced Perth, 1972). With The Tatty Hollow Story, Sydney, Currency Press, 1976.
Catspaw (produced Perth, 1974).
Miss Hewett's Shenanigans (produced Canberra, 1975).
Joan, music by Patrick Flynn (produced Canberra, 1975). Montmorency, Victoria, Yackandandah, 1984.
The Tatty Hollow Story (produced Sydney, 1976). With Bon-Bons and Roses for Dolly, Sydney, Currency Press, 1976.
The Beautiful Miss Portland, published in Theatre Australia (Sydney). November/December and Christmas 1976.
The Golden Oldies (produced Melbourne, 1976; London, 1978). With Susannah's Dreaming, Sydney, Currency Press, 1981.
Pandora's Cross (produced Sydney, 1978). Published in Theatre Australia (Sydney), September/October 1978.
The Man from Mukinupin (produced Perth, 1979). Sydney, Currency Press, 1980.
Susannah's Dreaming (broadcast 1980). With The Golden Oldies, Sydney, Currency Press, 1981.
Golden Valley (for children; produced Adelaide, 1981). With Song of the Seals, Sydney, Currency Press, 1985.
The Fields of Heaven (produced Perth, 1982).
Song of the Seals (for children), music by Jim Cotter (produced Adelaide, 1983). With Golden Valley, Sydney, Currency Press, 1985.
Christina's World (opera libretto; produced Sydney, 1983).
The Rising of Pete Marsh (produced Perth, 1988).
Collected Plays. Volume 1. Sydney, Currency Press, 1992.
Screenplays: For the First Time, with others, 1976; Journey among Women, with others, 1977; The Planter of Malata, with Cecil Holmes, 1983; Song of the Seals, 1984; Catch the Wild Fish, with Robert Adamson, 1985.
Radio Plays: Frost at Midnight, 1973; He Used to Notice Such Things, 1974; Susannah's Dreaming, 1980.
Novels
Bobbin Up. Sydney, Australasian Book Society, 1959; revised edition, London, Virago Press, 1985; revised edition, New York, Penguin, 1987.
The Toucher. Ringwood, Victoria, McPhee Gribble, and New York, Penguin, 1993.
Short Stories
The Australians Have a Word for It. Berlin, Seven Seas, 1964.
Women/Love/Sex. New York, Random House, 1996.
Other
Wild Card (autobiography). Melbourne, McPhee and Gribble, and London, Virago Press, 1990.
Editor, Sandgropers: A Western Australian Anthology. Nedlands, University of Western Australia Press, 1973.
*Bibliography: Dorothy Hewett: A Bibliography by Anne Casey, Sydney, Australian Library and Information Association Press, 1989.
Manuscript Collections: Australian National Library, Canberra; Fisher Library, University of Sydney; Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia; University of Queensland, St. Lucia; University of Western Australia, Nedlands.
Critical Studies: "Confession and Beyond" by Bruce Williams, in Overland (Melbourne), 1977; interview with Jim Davidson, in Meanjin (Melbourne), 1979; "On a Lonely Beach" by Paul Kavanagh, in Southerly (Sydney), 1984; "Dorothy Hewett As Poet," in Southerly (Sydney), 44 (4), 1984; "Jean Devanny, Katharine Susannah Prichard, and the 'Really Proletarian Novel"'" by Carole Ferrier, in Gender, Politics, and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women's Novels, edited by Carole Ferrier, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1985; "Working the Self: Issues of Form and Gender in Australian Fiction" by Paul Salzman, in Meanjin (Parkville, Victoria, Australia), 46 (4), December 1987; Setting the Stage: A Semiotic Re-Reading of Selected Australian Plays by Dorothy Hewett, Jack Hibbard, Louis Nowra, and Stephen Sewell (dissertation) by Joanne Elizabeth Tompkins, York University, 1993; "Representations of Female Identity in the Poetry of Dorothy Hewett" by Jenny Digby, in Southerly (Sydney), 53 (2), June 1993; Dorothy Hewett: Selected Critical Essays edited by Bruce Bennett, Canberra, Fremantle Arts Centre, 1995.
Dorothy Hewett comments:
(1980) My first collection, Windmill Country, was long delayed and therefore incorporated much that I had already outgrown. The locale of the book is firmly Western Australian, with consequent emphasis on landscape and ancestor worship. There is also a strong strain of politicizing in the book, influenced by regionalism and the Australian poets of my own generation, particularly Judith Wright. The book is uneven, romantic, and didactic. Rapunzel in Suburbia, my second collection, covers my time as an academic. It is strongly confessional, obviously influenced by Lowell and Plath, and romantic in style and subject. Fantasy is a central element in the book; there is also an introverted imagination linked with a sense of the dramatic. Greenhouse is an even more radical departure. The book covers my last three years in Sydney and is influenced by the city and by younger Australian city poets. There is a wider range of experimentation, a firmer control, and more substantial intellectual content. The lyrical, the fantastic, and the analytical predominate.
(1990) Alice in Wormland covers the last five years and, using a persona and a clipped contemporary shorthand, is the poetic biography of an Australian woman from childhood to death and after it.
* * *Dorothy Hewett is a writer of extraordinary versatility whose work as a dramatist and novelist is reflected in the theatricality and strong narrative sense of her poetry. Combined with her sure lyrical voice, these are the elements that extend her poetic range. Each book sustains continuity with those before but gathers enduring themes and symbols into fresh shapes.
Although she continues to write in many genres, Hewett's first publications were poems, and some of her most enduring work is to be found in Windmill Country. The romantic lyric "Legend of the Green Country," for example, engagingly captures her own and her forebearers' relationships with the wheat country of Western Australia, beginning with a flourish reminiscent of Dylan Thomas: "September is the spring month bringing tides, swilling green in the harbor mouth, /Turnabout dolphins rolling-backed in the rip and run, the king waves, /Swinging the coast." It then settles into a more individual voice—"this was my country, here I go back for nurture, /To the dry soaks, to the creeks running salt through the timber"—and concludes, once parents, grandparents, and landscape have been explored, with
I will pay this debt, go back and find my place,
Pick windfalls out of the grass like a mendicant.
The little sour apples still grow in my heart's orchard,
Bitter with grief, coming up out of the dead country.
Here I will eat their salt and speak my truth.
Hewett's 1970s poetry is unrelentingly and flamboyantly theatrical, reflecting her intense dramatic output during this period. Rapunzel in Suburbia and Greenhouse include poems of fantasy, erotically assertive, with a high level of role playing, as in "Miss Hewett's Shenanigans"—"They call, 'The Prince has come,' /& I swan down in astrakan & fur, /the lemon curtains blown against the light"—or as in "Coming to You"—"I ride across the flat land /like General Gabler's daughter." "Grave Fairytale" retells the Rapunzel legend—"Three times I lent my hair to the glowing prince"—but the object of the prince's lust is the black witch, "the beasts unsatisfied /roll in their sweat, their guttural cries /made the night thick with sound." The poem continues, "Each time I saw the framed-faced bully boy /sick with his triumph. /The third time I hid the shears … /Three seasons he stank at the tower's base."
In Alice in Wormland these roles are concentrated in the persona of Alice, and the autobiographical references take on a different form through the detachment this affords as well as by having been worked out in earlier, shorter poems. The extent of change may be perceived by comparing the lines on Hewett's grandfather in "Legend of the Green Country" with the highly dissimilar treatment of the same character in Alice:
He mended the gates, once a month he drove into town to
his "lodge",
A white carnation picked at dusk from my grandmother's garden,
A dress suit with a gold watch, a chain looped over his belly,
Magnificent! ("Legend of the Green Country")
her grandfather was a window dresser
at the Bon Marche
he swaggered to Lodge to ride the goat
naked a gold watch bounced on his belly (Alice)
The landscape is still recognizably Australian, but it is overlaid with mythic references that serve to unite the poem:
The ocean of yellow wheat
turns green in winter
& waves like the sea …
This was Eden perfect circular
the candid temples of her innocence
the homestead in the clearing
ringed with hills
the paddocks pollened deep in dandelions
the magic forest dark & beckoning …
Alice was driven howling from the garden.
The sexual energy of the poems finds its place in a voice unmistakably Hewett's, but there is a poignant restlessness running like a tracer throughout Alice. Nim, an elusive figure representative of male sexuality, appears after Alice is driven out of Eden into her "secret garden /under the hump of the hill," and his "changing face /laid waste her garden." Their final meeting is described in an intensely erotic sequence ("Japan"), but Nim's refusal to stay leads in "The Infernal Grove" to a second Fall and the destruction of this new, erotic Eden—"the garden's soft with fruit fly /the black snake coils /across the path to spring":
But I would rather
live in hell she said
& forfeit heaven
to have been with him.
"… She'd wait for him … till hell froze over … Hell froze over /the night came down /as Nim betrayed her." In the final section of the poem Alice and Nim, as owl and falcon, are reunited after her death: "it is the beast fable /it is the myth of ourselves /& only just beginning"; "that was the time /when they made friends with death."
Alice in Wormland is also a tale of political beliefs fought for and then lost ("Socialism with a human face was dead … she reinstated Art as her religion") and of an artist's journey to her sources. Alice's travels take her on a literary pilgrimage in which the most striking figure is Emily Brontë "coughing up blood and Gondal," but there are echoes of Yeats, Lawrence, and Byron. In focusing on the myth of the Fall and the quest for love, Alice in Wormland states more poignantly and consistently than any of Hewett's earlier poetry the paradox of the unattainable Eden.
Hewett's book Peninsula is set in a naturalistic garden lapped by the waves. (Ebb and flow are also important in her novel The Toucher.) This is a "silent garden /furred with frost /remote and still /where no one comes /where time itself is lost" ("Return to the Peninsula"). The waiting silence is not resigned but characteristically vital and questioning, captured in a striking natural image in "Return to the Peninsula":
the dry cough
of the foxes on the cliff
sitting together
their sparkling eyes
reflected off the sea
Interspersed with three peninsula poems—the first is "On the Peninsula" and the last is "The Last Peninsula"—are revisions of earlier images and childhood scenes. Australian landscape and Tennysonian myth are combined in "Lines to the Dark Tower":
Across the water meadows
on the grey sky
the dark tower stood alone
my father said
you can't live in a wheat silo
stinking of mouldy straw
and blood and bone
but he couldn't see
the plumes nodding above the hedges
In "Lady's Choice" the Lady of Shalott refuses to take the three paces to her death, and the knight is "pontificating /on God and mercy and grace and faces." Instead, "tomorrow I'll get up early /work on my poems and thread my loom."
The world of Windmill Country returns in "Still Lives," poems of "uncles and aunts and country cousins … they sift the dark fields /of my mind." But Peninsula always returns to the growing shadows of the garden by the sea, asking "what is the distance /between /bone and infinity? /bliss pain solitude /a breath of air" ("The Last Peninsula"). Spare, direct, and honest, the dramatic gesture remains possible. Peninsula celebrates the mystery at the heart of the familiar:
and shall I too
eventually disappear
in a garden hat and cloak
possibly accompanied by
a Platonic angel
leaving a note
I have been called away
from the dark cottage
but on what errand
and for what purpose?
—Nan Bowman Albinski