Two books to remember Dorothy Hewett's Centenary - 1923 to 2023

Click images for larger size.

Extracts from Singabout - the early songwriters - Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) & Merv Lilley (1919-2016)

These books have been compiled & published by Dorothy's son Joe Flood & Marilla North, see links for purchasing details.  Thanks to Karen Fong for the review of What About the People

Joe's youtube channel - Dorothy Hewett Centenary celebration 

Dorothy Hewett - facebook

Remembering Dorothy   

Dorothy Coade Hewett (1923-2002) was a major Australian playwright, poet and novelist, a true innovator of the theatre and a feminist icon. She fearlessly tackled all kinds of issues and shibboleths, setting her own direction and encouraging others to find their own path.

This is the first book-length biographical work on Dorothy Hewett. Like some of her best-known work, it has multiple perspectives, in which different people give their views of Dorothy, her life and work. This colours her complexity as a writer and as a person, while charting her setbacks along her rise to fame. It is a book of love from all who knew her.

Contents

Part I. Hewett's Wheatbelt 1923-45. "The heart and soul of a nation's literature". Her ancestors, and the matriarchy in which she lived. Her stormy and rebellious early life and her early talent, winning open national poetry prizes at the ages of 17 and 22. Her suicide attempt after a failed love affair, her first marriage and her embracing of activism.

Part II. The Perilous Path 1947-71. As a reporter on the Workers Star, she covered the 1947 Aboriginal Stockman's Strike in the Pilbara and wrote her anthem for the indigenous struggle, “Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod”.

In 1949 she eloped to Sydney, lived in a squat in Redfern and worked in a spinning mill. This gave her the material for her first novel Bobbin Up and her first play. In 1958 she escaped to Perth, and published her first joint book of poetry What About the People! which included a dozen folk anthems, especially "Weevils in the Flour" which became synonymous with the Depression. In the 1960s, many famous literary and music figures visited the "Crowded House" of five children. Her cycle of great "magic realism" plays began in 1971 with The Chapel Perilous.

Part III. City of Marvellous Experience. In her busiest period, from 1971 to 1979, her plays were performed across the country and her fame multiplied. Her character "Sally Banner" became a feminist icon. As well, she published three more books of poetry. This section has many of the memories from leading directors, actors, composers and literary figures.

Part IV. Mountain Maid. From 1990 to 2002 she won many awards, but she became increasingly immobile from osteoporosis. However, in her last years she published two novels, two more books of poetry and a final end-times play, Nowhere.

The book concludes with an assessment of her original contributions to literature in Australia and worldwide, The real woman, the public figure and the writer are disentangled as separate but intersecting entities.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

3rd edition of  What About the People - poems by Dorothy & her second husband Merv Lilley.

The legendary book What About the People was self-published in 1961 by the poets Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley. Twelve of the poems were set to music, most notably the lyrical ballads Wheevils in the flour and Norman Brown, and helped to launch the Australian Folk Revival. The first edition is now a rare collectors' item costing more than $600. This third edition of 120 copies is part of the centenary celebration of the birth of Dorothy Hewett, and is also a collector's item

=============
Review by Karen Fong, 29 September, 2024

A Review of What about the People! by Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley

The third edition of this book of verses contains 75 poems by Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) and her husband Merv Lilley (1914- 2014), published by Yarnspinners Press Collective with Deluge Publishing in Wentworth Falls. This special edition was published last year to commemorate Dorothy’s birth in 1923.

Available from https://deluge-publishing.square.site/product/WhatAboutthePeople/5 or 0444 500 266

Two of Dorothy’s poems that are familiar to folkies are ‘Ballad of Norman Brown’ and ‘Where I Grew To Be a Man’ (or better known as ‘Weevils in the Flour’). These two poems and many others by both Dorothy and Merv in fact have been put to music. This reviewer remembers hearing Bob Fagan sing ‘Ballad of Norman Brown’ at the Loaded Dog one Saturday evening last year in Annandale.

‘Weevils in the Flour’, about the life of Dorothy’s friend Vera Deacon during the Depression, has also been sung by many including, Gary Shearston, Declan Affley and Robyn Archer.

Merv Lilley was an early member of the Bush Music Club and first met Dorothy at a combined Bush Music Club and Sydney Realist Writers’ get-together in 1957. Many of the poems in this selection reflect his many occupations such as wool presser, cane cutter, lead mining and ship’s stoker in Queensland. One of the first poems in this book by Lilley, ‘What about the People?’, is a real call to action in the treatment of Aboriginal Peoples:

Mr Policeman, when you goin’ to stop arrestin’ me,
Jailin’ me and punchin’ me, chargin’ e with loiterin’.
Why do you bully me, Mr policeman?

Things don’t seem so different decades on. Merv’s poem ‘The Anti-Fouling Roll’, written in 1961, won the Waterside Workers’ Federation national song competition three years later.

It is difficult to choose favourites but Dorothy’s ‘Atomic Lullaby’ and 'Lulluby for Katie' stand out for this reviewer. Every parent wants their child(ren) to be safe:

Hush my baby, do not cry;
A mother’s tears are never dry,
The mushroom cloud hangs in the sky,
But lulla-lulla-lullaby.
I did not ache that you might die,
The world will hear my bloody cry - ….

Let’s hope so.

If you would like to step into the working lives of Australians in the decades after WWII, this book of poetry will give you a great insight.

.

~~

---