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Obituary
Dorothy Hewett
Poet, novelist and playwright. Born Wickepin, Western Australia, 1923. Died Springwood, NSW, August 25, aged 79.
IMET Dorothy Hewett in Perth in the late 1960s when I was a student with literary ambitions. I had met two or three published authors before but she was the first published poet. Knowing her was of huge importance for me and other young writers.
As a poet, Dorothy, who joined the Communist Party in 1945, developed from tub-thumping propaganda to -- after a period of silence -- works of complexity and beauty such as Legend of the Green Country and The Hidden Journey, the latter combining the story of her disillusionment with communism with soaring lyricism.
Yet the germs of this lyricism were evident even in her first collection, What About the People, shot through with lines different and superior to the run of party-line versifying of the day. When I met her she was moving from political activist to artist.
She and husband Merv Lilley, a huge, tough ex-seaman and cane- cutter and a considerable writer himself, made their South Perth home a meeting place for young writers. She was tutoring in English at the University of Western Australia but, unlike some academics, loved talking after hours.
It was a lively and productive literary salon, and there has been nothing like it in Perth since. Young writers of many different styles, ideas and politics congregated there.
It was...