The home team press in the West is standing behind its sometimes wayward player. Morrison’s perceptive and informative introduction to this selection explains her division of Hewett’s ‘prolific diversity’ of non-fiction prose writings under the general headings of Literature, Politics, and Theatre. She argues convincingly that Hewett’s ‘characteristic prose voice’, which emerge in the early 1960s, derives from ‘a romantic sense of vocation and place’ that is ‘larger than life’ and often characterised by ‘an idiosyncratic lyricism’. This pervasive romanticism is, however, undercut or complicated by Hewett’s interest in ‘Marxist social justice, communism, flagrant theatricality, popular culture, vaudeville, surrealism [and] modernism’.

The connecting thread is Hewett’s evolving sense of her vocation as a writer. An early essay on Edith Sitwell in the undergraduate magazine Black Swan in 1945 reveals her fascination both with the English poet’s projection of her idiosyncratic persona and her incorporation of ‘French moderns’, especially Rimbaud, in her writing. She revels in Sitwell’s Waste Land as ‘a world of bright objects suddenly hurled against the eyeballs, to the accompaniment of a screaming jazz band’. The contrast with Hewett’s workaday journalism for the communist Workers’ Star from 1946 to 1948 is sobering. In ‘Art Must Fight’ she writes formulaically that ‘To be alive, art must be in the forefront of the struggles of the working class’. She tries valiantly, but unavailingly, to inject some vitality into the arguments for equal pay for women while praising the mateship and solidarity of working men. She tells the Angry Penguins, ‘emotional godchildren of Ezra Pound’, to grow up. She is twenty-two. Twenty years later, by the mid-1960s, she could confront her political and artistic demons more directly, and notes the fear in ‘our Party’ of ‘imagination and emotional involvement’. By 1968 she had protested the Soviet Union’s treatment of dissident intellectuals, and left the Communist Party.

A somewhat surprising omission from this Selected Prose is Hewett’s autobiographical essay ‘Garden and City’ (Westerly,Volume4, 1982), the most eloquent account of her mythic regions of Western Australia and Sydney. The south-west was Hewett’s romantic Eden, but hypocritical innocence was its fatal worm in the bud. She escaped to Sydney to a difficult relationship with communist boilermaker Les Flood from 1954 to 1959, which produced three children and her social realist novel Bobbin Up (1958), before she escaped back to the west.

While recuperating in ‘the backyards of the bourgeoisie’ in South Perth, Hewett enjoyed her most sustaining relationship with left-wing sailor and writer Merv Lilley, with whom she had two daughters. While she taught in the English Department at the University of Western Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, she developed a critical and creative outlook influenced in part by F.R. Leavis and the writings of D.H. Lawrence. In one unforgettable poem, she recalls her Leavisite professor, once a new broom, ‘torturing his paper clips’. But the university was also where she encountered the open-air New Fortune Theatre. This inspired an adventurous spirit and several plays culminating in her Western Australian hits, The Chapel Perilous (1972) and The Man from Mukinupin (1979).

Hewett’s return with her family to Sydney, her city of dreams, in 1975 was a mid-life revelation – a liberating encounter with new writers, modernist poetry, and experimental theatre. ‘From Sydney and the long nights of talk, and coffee and smokes and booze,’ she wrote, ‘I began to forge a new poetic style, crisper, harder-edged, modernist, to be the scaffold for a Romantic vision and imagination’ (Westerly, Volume 4, December 1982).

Hewett’s most stimulating essays and talks in the Selected Prose reveal her engagement with writers who influenced her most profoundly. While she reads omnivorously in international literature, Hewett’s chief avatars are Australians – two Western Australians, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Randolph Stow, and two Sydneysiders, Patrick White and Robert Adamson. In Prichard she sees a gifted and politically committed left-wing writer who, in Yeats’s terms, had made a stone of her heart. On the other hand, Stow inspires her to see her homeland in symbolic and mythic terms, and introduces her to the possibilities of finely modulated poetic prose and the opportunities to create a mythic homeland in memory and imagination. The Merry-go-round in the Sea (1965) is a lodestone, though Hewett seems wary about the kind of nostalgia that encourages expatriation and defeatism. White showed her ways forward for an innovatory drama that combined elements of expressionism, Surrealism, and symbolic writing using choruses, interludes, and farcical scenes. Brecht was another influence in her Sydney plays, but she inherited from both the artistic problems of tonal coherence and what she recognised self-critically as her most difficult problem as a dramatist – ‘construction’.

This Selected Prose contains a lively and often illuminating sample of Hewett’s non-fiction writings. Unfortunately, the book seriously misrepresents its remarkable author by introducing numerous misprints and errors of syntax, punctuation, and spelling. These cannot be attributed to Hewett, but to the keepers of her flame. An editor’s note states that the prose selected has been transcribed, with one exception, from published texts. However, these transcriptions are badly flawed, with the result that many well-known names of authors, characters, places, and book titles are mangled, and Hewett’s vivid prose is distorted. The author would not be pleased, and nor should we be, with this book from a university press. The home team and the Sydney editor should have done better.