Dorothy Coade Hewett was an Australian playwright, poet and author, and a romantic feminist icon. In writing and in her life, Hewett was an experimenter. As her circumstances and beliefs changed, she progressed through different literary styles: modernism, socialist realism, expressionism and avant garde. She was a member of the Australian Communist Party in the 1950s and 1960s, which informed her work during that period.
Geoffrey Robert Marsh is an Australian former cricketer, coach and selector. He played 50 Test matches and 117 One Day Internationals for Australia as an opening batsman. Marsh was a part of the Australian team that won their first world title during the 1987 Cricket World Cup. As the coach of Australia he was in charge when Australia won the 1999 Cricket World Cup in England. He later coached Zimbabwe (2001–2004) and Sri Lanka (2011–12).
Colleen Hewett is an Australian singer and actress.
The Regal Theatre is a fine Art Deco theatre located in the suburb of Subiaco in Perth, Western Australia. It was built in 1937, and the official opening was on 27 April 1938. It was built by a wealthy grazier family Coade/Hewett, who were the grandparents and parents of the playwright Dorothy Hewett.
Theatre of Australia refers to the history of the live performing arts in Australia: performed, written or produced by Australians.
Kate Lilley is a contemporary Australian poet and academic.
Perth College is an independent Anglican day and boarding school for girls located in Mount Lawley, an inner northern suburb of Perth, Western Australia. The school maintains a non-selective enrolment policy and currently has approximately 1,000 students from Kindergarten to Year 12, including 110 boarders from Year 7 onwards.
The 1987 WAFL season was the 103rd season of the West Australian Football League in its various incarnations. This season saw a Western Australia-based team, West Coast, was one of two interstate teams to make their debut in the Victorian Football League (VFL), which had profound effects on the WAFL competition. The Eagles took away thirty-five of the competition's best players, severely reducing attendances and club revenue, the latter of which was further affected by the payment of the Eagles’ licence fee to the VFL. The WAFL budgeted for a 30 percent decline in attendances, but the observed decline was over fifty percent, and they were also hit by Channel Seven telecasting the Round 17 Hawthorn versus Footscray match, breaching agreements to not telecast non-Eagles VFL matches to Perth.
Josephine Wilson is an Australian writer and academic based in Perth, Western Australia.
This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, Dorothy Hewett's first full-length play, was written in 1965. It captures the spirit and character of Redfern, an inner-city suburb of Sydney sometimes called "Australia's last slum". The play is ‘slice of life', following about six months in the life of the Dockertys, an extended family of seven children and partners, during the early 1950s. The family is subject to various stresses: most significantly because the mother is an alcoholic, largely lost in dreams of her youth.
The Chapel Perilous, Dorothy Hewett's third full-length play, was written in 1970. The play is Expressionist in style, where the theatrical spectacle dominates the plot. It introduces Sally Banner, a picaresque heroine moving without success through a search for love and freedom, while oppressed by authority figures and disappointed by unsatisfactory lovers. She is, in brief succession, a defiant schoolgirl, a promiscuous wartime student, a Communist, a suburban de facto, and a well-known poet. It is recognised as Hewett's best play.
The Man from Mukinupin is a musical play by Dorothy Hewett. It was commissioned in 1978 to mark Western Australia's sesquicentenary, and is her most popular and successful play. It is a romantic comedy in two acts covering the periods 1912 to 1914 and 1918 to 1920. The play involves the principles of celebration and reconciliation, providing a "rich theatrical experience with song, dance, humour, and powerful incident."
Bonbons and Roses for Dolly, Dorothy Hewett's fourth full-length play, was written in 1971, soon after The Chapel Perilous. It begins with the rise to riches of three generations of a family, and the opening of their new picture house, the Crystal Palace. Over the years the cinema descends into ruin. The daughter Dolly inherits the decaying theatre. She symbolically shoots her grandparents and parents, then herself, as her dreams crumble.
The Tatty Hollow Story, Dorothy Hewett's fifth full-length play, and last of a series of expressionist plays, was written in 1974 after Hewett's move from Perth to Sydney.
Golden Valley is a children's play by Dorothy Hewett for audiences aged 4-14, It is "a free-spirited and distinctly Australian fairytale ", telling the story of a 12-year-old orphan Marigold, who is adopted by a group of bush creatures. They take her to the magical land of Golden Valley, which is under threat from a nasty developer. Together Marigold and the creatures -- including a crane, a mopoke, a possum, a wombat, a feral cat and a shape-changing boy -- battle to save their patch of paradise.
What About the People! is a joint 1961 book of verse by Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) and Merv Lilley (1919-2014). It was the first book-length publication of poetry by either poet. What About the People! represented much of their significant output up to that time.The 1962 reprinting contained 43 poems by Lilley and 31 by Hewett, with one poem probably composed jointly.
Bobbin Up was the first novel by the author Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002). It is set in 1957 in a spinning mill in Alexandria, an industrial suburb of inner Sydney, and describes the lives of fifteen working-class women who work there for breadline wages. The novel is a series of loosely connected vignettes, where the life of each woman and her family is described within one or two chapters. The book concludes with a stay-in strike by the women for reinstatement after a mass layoff. Most of the group appear together in the final chapter.
Me and the Man in the Moon is a 1987 play by Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett, with music by Robert Page. It recreates the days of the travelling tent show which took melodrama and variety theatre to country audiences from 1910 to the 1950s. One of these travelling variety shows also appears in Hewett's hit play The Man from Mukinupin.
Catspaw is a 1974 rock musical by Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett, with music by Terence Clarke, Piers Partridge and Roy Ritchie. It was Hewett's fifth full-length play and her first rock musical. It was written for the Festival of Perth before Hewett departed permanently for Sydney in early 1974. Catspaw is an expressionist or "epic" play with an episodic plot loosely based on a quest. It is the first of Hewett's plays that deals with the conservation of Australia, both as landscape and cultural heritage, where "imagination" is a universal cultural force opposed to the destruction caused by commercial interests.
The Fields of Heaven is a play written by Dorothy Hewett in 1982. It shows the gradual destruction of a once-beautiful country property in the Great Southern district of Western Australia, Marvel Locke, due to overgrazing and rising salt. In Act 1 it is tree-covered with fields of wheat like "cloth of gold". In Act 2, only a few straggling trees remain. Evocative bush sounds give way to harsh crow calls.
