Cirrus@Austlit

'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.'  (Publication summary)

'Dymphna Cusack's books were best-sellers in Australia and more than thirty other countries in the mid to late twentieth century. Radio and television adaptations of her novels and plays reached audiences across three continents. Her works continue to provide a valuable record of people within their cultures engaging with the socio-political issues of the particular time and place. Her two novels that dealt with the impact of World War Two on the lives of ordinary Australians at the Home Front - Come in Spinner (1951) and Southern Steel (1953) - were immediate best-sellers and have never been out of print. Southern Steel brought her legendary status in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley where (in early 1937) she had already earned a reputation as an advocate for the working class. At the opening of the new Cessnock High School she publicly denounced the then Minister for Education for his government's health policies (or lack thereof) vis- -vis malnutrition in the children of the mining families of the Hunter at the height of the Great Depression (North, RN). Come in Spinner was later made into a popular ABC-TV mini-series. Produced in 1989, the DVD has kept its place in the ABC's backlist as a valuable resource in social history classes.'

Source: Abstract.