Dorothy Hewett: Contents page

Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002) was raised on her parents’ isolated wheat farm in Western Australia. By the time she was twenty she was a prize-winning playwright and poet and had joined the Communist Party. She attended university, travelled to Melbourne and Sydney, worked in factories, left the Communist Party in 1968, and moved permanently to Sydney in 1974. She wrote dozens of successful plays, books of poems, novels, and memoirs. Her emotional life was as turbulent as her politics: she had three husbands and six children. For the last decade of her life she lived in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.