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Bobbin Up
Four young Australian factory workers, Shirl, Dawnie, Patty, and Nell, a Communist Party member, band together to face their problems
204 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1959
7 people are currently reading
164 people want to read
About the author
Dorothy Hewett
46 books5 followersDorothy Coade Hewett (21 May 1923 – 25 August 2002) was an Australian feminist poet, novelist, librettist and playwright. She was also a member of the Communist Party of Australia, though she clashed on many occasions with the party's leadership.
Hewett was born in Perth and was brought up on a sheep and wheat farm near Wickepin in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. She was initially educated at home and through correspondence courses. From the age of 15 she attended Perth College, which was run by Anglican nuns. Hewett was an atheist, remaining so all her life.
In 1944 Hewett began studying English at the University of Western Australia (UWA). It was here that she joined the Communist Party in 1946. Also during her time at UWA she won a major drama competition and a national poetry competition.
In 1948 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959, following Hewett's departure to Sydney to conduct a relationship with a boilermaker named Les Flood. She bore Flood three sons over nine years, during which time she wrote no poetry owing to the family's constant struggle against poverty. However, the time she spent working in a clothing factory during this period did inform some of her most famous works.
Following the end of this relationship in 1958 Hewett returned to Perth to take up a teaching post in the English department at UWA. This move also inspired her to begin writing again. Jeannie (1958) was the first piece she completed following her enforced hiatus, Hewett later admitted to finding this a rejuvenating experience.
Hewett published her first novel, Bobbin Up, in 1959. As the title suggests it was a semi-autobiographical work based on her time in Sydney, the novel was a cathartic work for Hewett. The novel is widely regarded as a classic example of social realism. It was one of the few western works that was translated into Russian during the Soviet era.
In 1960 Hewett married again, this time to writer Merv Lilley, the marriage would last until the end of her life. They had two daughters, Kate and Rose. The couple published a collection of poetry together in 1961 entitled What About the People!.
In 1967 Hewett's increasing disillusionment with Communist politics was evidenced by her collection Hidden Journey. Things came to a head for her on 20 August 1968, when the Red Army brutally suppressed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. She renounced her membership of the Communist Party. This and her critical obituary of the Communist novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, caused several Communist writers to circulate material attacking her.
In 1973 Hewett was awarded one of the first fellowships by the newly formed Australia Council. The organisation granted her several fellowships, and later awarded her a lifetime emeritus fellowship. Hewett returned to Sydney that year with the hope that this move would further her career as a playwright. During her life she wrote 15 plays, the most famous of which are: This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1967), The Chapel Perilous (1972), and The Golden Oldies (1981). Several plays, such as The Man From Mukinupin (1979), were written in collaboration with Australian composer Jim Cotter.
In 1975, she published a controversial collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, which resulted in the pursuit of successful libel action by her ex-husband Lloyd Davies in relation to specific verses and their quotation in a review by Hal Colebatch in The West Australian newspaper.
Virago Press published the first volume of her autobiography, Wild Card, in 1990. The book dealt with her lifelong quest for sexual freedom and the negative responses she received from those around her. Two years later she published her second novel, The Toucher.
In 1990 a painting of Hewett by artist Geoffrey Proud won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most prominent portrait prize.
Hewett was born in Perth and was brought up on a sheep and wheat farm near Wickepin in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. She was initially educated at home and through correspondence courses. From the age of 15 she attended Perth College, which was run by Anglican nuns. Hewett was an atheist, remaining so all her life.
In 1944 Hewett began studying English at the University of Western Australia (UWA). It was here that she joined the Communist Party in 1946. Also during her time at UWA she won a major drama competition and a national poetry competition.
In 1948 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959, following Hewett's departure to Sydney to conduct a relationship with a boilermaker named Les Flood. She bore Flood three sons over nine years, during which time she wrote no poetry owing to the family's constant struggle against poverty. However, the time she spent working in a clothing factory during this period did inform some of her most famous works.
Following the end of this relationship in 1958 Hewett returned to Perth to take up a teaching post in the English department at UWA. This move also inspired her to begin writing again. Jeannie (1958) was the first piece she completed following her enforced hiatus, Hewett later admitted to finding this a rejuvenating experience.
Hewett published her first novel, Bobbin Up, in 1959. As the title suggests it was a semi-autobiographical work based on her time in Sydney, the novel was a cathartic work for Hewett. The novel is widely regarded as a classic example of social realism. It was one of the few western works that was translated into Russian during the Soviet era.
In 1960 Hewett married again, this time to writer Merv Lilley, the marriage would last until the end of her life. They had two daughters, Kate and Rose. The couple published a collection of poetry together in 1961 entitled What About the People!.
In 1967 Hewett's increasing disillusionment with Communist politics was evidenced by her collection Hidden Journey. Things came to a head for her on 20 August 1968, when the Red Army brutally suppressed the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia. She renounced her membership of the Communist Party. This and her critical obituary of the Communist novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard, caused several Communist writers to circulate material attacking her.
In 1973 Hewett was awarded one of the first fellowships by the newly formed Australia Council. The organisation granted her several fellowships, and later awarded her a lifetime emeritus fellowship. Hewett returned to Sydney that year with the hope that this move would further her career as a playwright. During her life she wrote 15 plays, the most famous of which are: This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1967), The Chapel Perilous (1972), and The Golden Oldies (1981). Several plays, such as The Man From Mukinupin (1979), were written in collaboration with Australian composer Jim Cotter.
In 1975, she published a controversial collection of poems, Rapunzel in Suburbia, which resulted in the pursuit of successful libel action by her ex-husband Lloyd Davies in relation to specific verses and their quotation in a review by Hal Colebatch in The West Australian newspaper.
Virago Press published the first volume of her autobiography, Wild Card, in 1990. The book dealt with her lifelong quest for sexual freedom and the negative responses she received from those around her. Two years later she published her second novel, The Toucher.
In 1990 a painting of Hewett by artist Geoffrey Proud won the Archibald Prize, Australia's most prominent portrait prize.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
February 10, 2021
Working class literature is such a difficult thing to find. As almost always, this one is not written by its subjects, and so it's filtered through the lens of the middle class private schoolgirl from suburban Perth who moved to Sydney out of class-guilt and begged to be put in the worst factory her Communist party handlers could find.
Yes, she may have only been playing at the game of poverty, but she captured her workmates and neighbours with genuine care and a brilliant eye.
This is a novel of dozens of women and the struggle of working class life in 1950s Sydney. It is quintessentially Australian: rough, funny, no-nonsense, tender, aspirational, viscerally hot and sweaty. They have husbands, children, mothers, friends, neighbours, landladies, and bosses to contend with. Life is hard, but they have to live through it anyway.
The peek into their lives we get is framed by two things: the flyover of Sputnik, that Communist icon, as it sparks conversations about the Russian future, the future of the workers, the future of technology.
And the threat of a downturn in the manufacturing industries that litter inner Sydney and employ so many of its citizens. Talk on the radio of layoffs, agreed with the unions who spend more time with the bosses than the workers, the constant fear of not keeping your head above water, the ease with which people are fired for not doing enough overtime, all of these are captured with frightening reality.
Yes, Hewett may have been too optimistic about the future of communism in Australia, but even if her outcomes are too hopeful, her story and the points it makes are beautifully put together, and it strikes home.
Later: I've just watched this documentary made in 1969 about the slum housing of St. Ann's in Nottingham, and it strikes such a similar chord to this book (damp notwithstanding) that it deserves a link.
Yes, she may have only been playing at the game of poverty, but she captured her workmates and neighbours with genuine care and a brilliant eye.
This is a novel of dozens of women and the struggle of working class life in 1950s Sydney. It is quintessentially Australian: rough, funny, no-nonsense, tender, aspirational, viscerally hot and sweaty. They have husbands, children, mothers, friends, neighbours, landladies, and bosses to contend with. Life is hard, but they have to live through it anyway.
The peek into their lives we get is framed by two things: the flyover of Sputnik, that Communist icon, as it sparks conversations about the Russian future, the future of the workers, the future of technology.
And the threat of a downturn in the manufacturing industries that litter inner Sydney and employ so many of its citizens. Talk on the radio of layoffs, agreed with the unions who spend more time with the bosses than the workers, the constant fear of not keeping your head above water, the ease with which people are fired for not doing enough overtime, all of these are captured with frightening reality.
Yes, Hewett may have been too optimistic about the future of communism in Australia, but even if her outcomes are too hopeful, her story and the points it makes are beautifully put together, and it strikes home.
Later: I've just watched this documentary made in 1969 about the slum housing of St. Ann's in Nottingham, and it strikes such a similar chord to this book (damp notwithstanding) that it deserves a link.
June 26, 2009
Well, as the author intro mentions, this is definitely a little too starry-eyed about communism and factory strikes, in that realistic working-class with two jobs and relationship issues kind of way. It will all be better when we gets our rights, etc. That said, it's very good. I tend to read this more as a piece of historical documentation than a novel, which is good, because it's more or less a big piece of propaganda.
It's also straight up Australian, which is interesting, since you barely ever find any Australian books in the swath of English lang lit. You'd think there would be a lot more around. Is there some persistent attitude toward colonials going on?
It's also straight up Australian, which is interesting, since you barely ever find any Australian books in the swath of English lang lit. You'd think there would be a lot more around. Is there some persistent attitude toward colonials going on?
August 6, 2019
Dorothy Hewett wrote this novel in 1958 when she was still full of Communist revolutionary ardour. Hewett, from a rich middle-class Western Australian family with a private school background, had come East to work for a year at Alexandria Spinning Mills in Sydney to get first-hand experience of the plight of the proletariat. The characters and working conditions described in her novel are based on her time at that notorious factory. It therefore comes as no surprise that the book is blatantly propagandistic and the main protagonist is Hewett’s alter ego, Nell.
On the other hand it is a vivid (though subjective) testimony of those times and an intimate portrait of working class lives in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney in the fifties. However, in order to make her point about the evils of capitalism, the picture she paints is very black and white and the non-workers are practically caricatures. Even if life for the Australian working classes was hard (as it was for the working classes all over the world) it can’t all have been strife, bitterness and relentless gloom and kindness, generosity and humanity can’t have been the exclusive property of the toiling masses.
I had no problem with the episodic style of the novel. Each chapter is a perfect vignette of one of the fictitious Jumbuck Mill workers, of her life, her home, her family, her background, her hopes, ambitions, fears and disappointments. I could relate to all of them but it’s the older women who really tugged at my heart-strings as they struggled out of the factory in their sweat-soaked overalls and dragged their tired varicose-veined legs to the bus-stops, on the trains and up the roads on their long treks home for the house-work and their few hours of rest. The men don’t come off as well in the novel; they are more defeated than the women and their main function seems to be to make pompous speeches (“I’ve been a battler all me life…”), feel sorry for themselves and make sure that there is always another baby on the way that they won’t be able to provide for.
It’s not only the women who are lovingly portrayed but also the working-class suburbs of Sydney with their respectable and not so respectable streets and alleys, their sagging weatherboard houses, picket fences and rusty wrought-iron balconies, their tiny dry and dusty yards, the cheap boarding-houses, the shrieking trams, the factory chimneys,the little corner-stores, the stink, the smog, the asphalt melting from the heat, the snatches of popular songs from the radio wafting through open doors and windows, kids playing in the street and above all the huge Australian sky. I could see, hear and smell it all.
Anyway, while the women were spending their waking hours battling and struggling to maintain their families in the face of unemployment, short time, retrenchment, slum-clearance, life on the dole, a meager pension or the poorhouse, members of Australia’s Communist party were looking towards the Soviet Union as a guiding light to “another world to be built, here on earth, based on brotherhood and selflessness” and “the symbol of our hope is Sputnik “that the great army of toilers have helped to put into the skies of the world and will fight to keep it there” (talk about pompous !). Sputnik was almost another Star of Bethlemen, a promise of the salvation of mankind - and we all know how that turned out.
Ms Hewett - who left the Communist party in 1968 after the truth about the Stalinist terror regime had come out - later called this work “sometimes sentimental, sometimes didactic, sometimes clumsy and overwritten. It may be all that but I very much enjoyed it all the same.
On the other hand it is a vivid (though subjective) testimony of those times and an intimate portrait of working class lives in the inner-city suburbs of Sydney in the fifties. However, in order to make her point about the evils of capitalism, the picture she paints is very black and white and the non-workers are practically caricatures. Even if life for the Australian working classes was hard (as it was for the working classes all over the world) it can’t all have been strife, bitterness and relentless gloom and kindness, generosity and humanity can’t have been the exclusive property of the toiling masses.
I had no problem with the episodic style of the novel. Each chapter is a perfect vignette of one of the fictitious Jumbuck Mill workers, of her life, her home, her family, her background, her hopes, ambitions, fears and disappointments. I could relate to all of them but it’s the older women who really tugged at my heart-strings as they struggled out of the factory in their sweat-soaked overalls and dragged their tired varicose-veined legs to the bus-stops, on the trains and up the roads on their long treks home for the house-work and their few hours of rest. The men don’t come off as well in the novel; they are more defeated than the women and their main function seems to be to make pompous speeches (“I’ve been a battler all me life…”), feel sorry for themselves and make sure that there is always another baby on the way that they won’t be able to provide for.
It’s not only the women who are lovingly portrayed but also the working-class suburbs of Sydney with their respectable and not so respectable streets and alleys, their sagging weatherboard houses, picket fences and rusty wrought-iron balconies, their tiny dry and dusty yards, the cheap boarding-houses, the shrieking trams, the factory chimneys,the little corner-stores, the stink, the smog, the asphalt melting from the heat, the snatches of popular songs from the radio wafting through open doors and windows, kids playing in the street and above all the huge Australian sky. I could see, hear and smell it all.
Anyway, while the women were spending their waking hours battling and struggling to maintain their families in the face of unemployment, short time, retrenchment, slum-clearance, life on the dole, a meager pension or the poorhouse, members of Australia’s Communist party were looking towards the Soviet Union as a guiding light to “another world to be built, here on earth, based on brotherhood and selflessness” and “the symbol of our hope is Sputnik “that the great army of toilers have helped to put into the skies of the world and will fight to keep it there” (talk about pompous !). Sputnik was almost another Star of Bethlemen, a promise of the salvation of mankind - and we all know how that turned out.
Ms Hewett - who left the Communist party in 1968 after the truth about the Stalinist terror regime had come out - later called this work “sometimes sentimental, sometimes didactic, sometimes clumsy and overwritten. It may be all that but I very much enjoyed it all the same.
November 29, 2016
Brilliant. This is a working class Australian classic from 1959, the first novel from the woman who went on to become one of Australia's best known playwrights. I love novels that focus on and describe work and Hewett does that beautifully here, in an episodic novel that flits between a number of women working at a spinning mill in Sydney. There are lyrical elements, particularly connected with the passage of Sputnik through the skies overhead, but also snippets of song that float through the novel and a wonderfully vivid evocation of the sounds and feel of a Sydney summer. Everyone is on the edge as they try to eke out an existence and several of the women have the added anxiety of pregnancy to deal with. The Communist party plays a significant role in the story and in her introduction for the Virago edition Hewett expresses a little embarrassment about forcing her viewpoint onto some of the characters, especially as she became rather less enamoured of the party later, but it doesn't detract from the novel and the depiction of the meeting where they debate the merits of a pamphlet to be distributed at the mill is a a minor classic of its kind. Highly recommended.
July 9, 2015
This was written by Hewett when she was involved in the Communist Party and reflects some of her own experiences in working in a textile factory in Sydney and the lives of the other women workers. I enjoyed it and found it to be an interesting snapshot of working and personal lives of women in the late 1950s.
September 27, 2023
This is probably the only novel dealing with women's factory conditions and social conditions for working class women in the 1950s - certainly the only one taken from first-hand observation and experience. it also has strong characterisation and technical adroitness. The book is lively and engaging; it is no mean technical feat trying to present satisfactory characterisations of fourteen different women without losing the thread. For these reasons, the book should be read.
It's also something to see the author and her family depicted in two separate chapters as two different characters with a ten-year gap.
I dont agree with the usual critiques of this book. Propaganda for communism? We read capitalist and woke propaganda all the time and think nothing of it. Of course people should get together and improve their workplace conditions if they are dangerous. Cultural appropriation? Did slaves get slavery removed? Do billionaires write about being rich? To a fair extent, authors are always outsiders. Episodic, no real central character? As Hewett said very much later, this form is perfect for the material and theme.
I think the book was written too quickly (six weeks for a competition) which makes it seem a bit clumsy. It could have used a good edit and cleanup. It's a Good Start though, from someone who would go on to become one of Australia's greatest writers in four genres.
I am uncomfortable with the presentation of single women as being “fair game” for a certain class of men who feel entitled to assault and manhandle them with impunity as just part of the average day. I’m sure this was reality for working class women right up till the 1980s but today it is hard to read.
I also don't care for the depiction of unrelieved misery in the South Sydney working class areas -a "tourist's view" and culture shock from a well-meaning observer who had only recently arrived. The real difference between Hewett's later play "This Old Man Comes Rolling Home" and "Bobbin Up" are what ultimately became Hewett’s trademark and saving grace – the play is full of wit, humour and hope against the odds, and is packed with quotable quotes, whereas the novel is set in unrelieved dreary suburbia full of miserable people (see wikipedia for both).
I have spent quite some time in the slums of the Third World, most of which are considerably less congenial than Sydney’s Inner South once was, and I have found more good cheer, humour and community spirit than I have found in comfortable suburbia. I am not surprised that the play continues to be performed more than fifty years after it was written, whereas the book is not read so much except as "genre".
It's also something to see the author and her family depicted in two separate chapters as two different characters with a ten-year gap.
I dont agree with the usual critiques of this book. Propaganda for communism? We read capitalist and woke propaganda all the time and think nothing of it. Of course people should get together and improve their workplace conditions if they are dangerous. Cultural appropriation? Did slaves get slavery removed? Do billionaires write about being rich? To a fair extent, authors are always outsiders. Episodic, no real central character? As Hewett said very much later, this form is perfect for the material and theme.
I think the book was written too quickly (six weeks for a competition) which makes it seem a bit clumsy. It could have used a good edit and cleanup. It's a Good Start though, from someone who would go on to become one of Australia's greatest writers in four genres.
I am uncomfortable with the presentation of single women as being “fair game” for a certain class of men who feel entitled to assault and manhandle them with impunity as just part of the average day. I’m sure this was reality for working class women right up till the 1980s but today it is hard to read.
I also don't care for the depiction of unrelieved misery in the South Sydney working class areas -a "tourist's view" and culture shock from a well-meaning observer who had only recently arrived. The real difference between Hewett's later play "This Old Man Comes Rolling Home" and "Bobbin Up" are what ultimately became Hewett’s trademark and saving grace – the play is full of wit, humour and hope against the odds, and is packed with quotable quotes, whereas the novel is set in unrelieved dreary suburbia full of miserable people (see wikipedia for both).
I have spent quite some time in the slums of the Third World, most of which are considerably less congenial than Sydney’s Inner South once was, and I have found more good cheer, humour and community spirit than I have found in comfortable suburbia. I am not surprised that the play continues to be performed more than fifty years after it was written, whereas the book is not read so much except as "genre".
June 26, 2022
Laurie Clancy is quoted as saying Dorothy Hewett's novel ends "not on a note of unalloyed optimism but a much more ambiguous hopefulness." This is an achievement given the living and working conditions of these women in the inner suburbs of Sydney in the 1950s. The Communist Party looms large in their lives but the path to revolution is not an easy one. Especially given the Menzies bill intended to ban the Communist Party after which Stan and Nell have to hide the roneo machine on which they print copies of their political call to arms, 'Bobbin Up. These are tough times on many fronts:
"Influx of cheap Japanese textiles... tightening up of the overall economy... synthetics taking the place of wool..." weren't they all legitimate capitalist excuses for cutting down labour, just like mechanization on the shares, and diesel power to replace coal? There wasn't any shortage to these problems. It was all bound up with the muddle and waste of capitalism."(127)
The poetry of Dylan Thomas, however, takes over at times in a Sydney that reads more like a village, a small pond filled with giant personalities engaged in the struggle to keep their heads above the water. Hewlett writes:
"Peace in Miller Street... Polly Tickner kept her light on in the best room until well after midnight, scraping and rummaging through her father's old papers like a cockroach in a sea of litter, turning over cancelled mortgages, bills of sale and bad debts.
Lou lay dreaming, her hair in battleships, her mouth puckered tenderly like a child's, dreaming of Sunny Corner and Sammy Snow, that lovely man,who might have shared her rass-knobbed double bed instead of Hughie" (27)
Dorothy Hewett like the Welsh Dylan Thomas and Scottish Sheena Mackay is another 'supreme lyricist of daily grot". Depressingly as Julie is making her way to work at the mill she stops to talk to a 'New Australian girl' Nina who is feeding milk to a 'crowd of wailing cats'. "...in this country plenty of milk" she explains. When Julie asks where she comes from Nina replies, "Ukraine... a Ukrainian... not my country any more now." (179) In defence of the communists Nell says Nina was in "DP camps all over Europe ever since the war. The Nazis took her outta the Ukraine when she was twelve years old, and filled her up with so much rubbish, she wasn't game to go back." (191) And so the blame game goes back and forth... Orwell picked it a decade earlier.
"Influx of cheap Japanese textiles... tightening up of the overall economy... synthetics taking the place of wool..." weren't they all legitimate capitalist excuses for cutting down labour, just like mechanization on the shares, and diesel power to replace coal? There wasn't any shortage to these problems. It was all bound up with the muddle and waste of capitalism."(127)
The poetry of Dylan Thomas, however, takes over at times in a Sydney that reads more like a village, a small pond filled with giant personalities engaged in the struggle to keep their heads above the water. Hewlett writes:
"Peace in Miller Street... Polly Tickner kept her light on in the best room until well after midnight, scraping and rummaging through her father's old papers like a cockroach in a sea of litter, turning over cancelled mortgages, bills of sale and bad debts.
Lou lay dreaming, her hair in battleships, her mouth puckered tenderly like a child's, dreaming of Sunny Corner and Sammy Snow, that lovely man,who might have shared her rass-knobbed double bed instead of Hughie" (27)
Dorothy Hewett like the Welsh Dylan Thomas and Scottish Sheena Mackay is another 'supreme lyricist of daily grot". Depressingly as Julie is making her way to work at the mill she stops to talk to a 'New Australian girl' Nina who is feeding milk to a 'crowd of wailing cats'. "...in this country plenty of milk" she explains. When Julie asks where she comes from Nina replies, "Ukraine... a Ukrainian... not my country any more now." (179) In defence of the communists Nell says Nina was in "DP camps all over Europe ever since the war. The Nazis took her outta the Ukraine when she was twelve years old, and filled her up with so much rubbish, she wasn't game to go back." (191) And so the blame game goes back and forth... Orwell picked it a decade earlier.
February 1, 2025
Did the bio author even read the book? Its about a man lost seeking his way during his midlife crisis. One of the last itinerant workers seeks refuge in the Seaman's union.
The Title of it is a reference both to Channel Country, where Merv's character starts off working variously as a Wool Presser, Cane Cutter, and Miner. It is also reference to the emotional state seafarers used to get into as they approached port.
The story is set with the backdrop of the political situation of the time (specifically Menzies Communist Party Dissolution Bill, and his alliance with Bob Santamaria's Catholic Social Studies Movement). The protagonist goes by various names; Jack Long, Longfellow John Long, and embraces the name Jack Lang briefly when someone misheard his name (this is indeed a reference to the NSW Premier of the early 1930s). He is always in the rank of second class: a woolpresser not a shearer, and cane cutter, and a first time seafarer. He sees himself as an equal of his Party leaders, but is denied the corresponding rank due to (after reading between the lines) his anarchist tendencies. Worthy of Glory, ever the underdog; as I describe it. He is a wanderer; an itinerant labourer who is yet to find his place in the world. He bemoans the unoriginality of the Catholic women he meets routinely; who all turn their nose at him once they find out he's a communist, or who try to tame him. He cannot settle down; for before him is the eternal struggle for socialism. At various points he suggests the struggle is eternal and unending; but that he must try anyway, for it is his purpose in life. While the book ends before the Split of 1962, he implies it would become a turning point in his life.
I relate to this novel on a personal level; both Jack's experience's, and his character, are reminiscent of my own. The unending struggle for socialism as life's purpose, the catholic woman attempting to draw us from it, and the lack of recognition for our quality. Through it all; a pervading sense of individuality and loneliness.
The Title of it is a reference both to Channel Country, where Merv's character starts off working variously as a Wool Presser, Cane Cutter, and Miner. It is also reference to the emotional state seafarers used to get into as they approached port.
The story is set with the backdrop of the political situation of the time (specifically Menzies Communist Party Dissolution Bill, and his alliance with Bob Santamaria's Catholic Social Studies Movement). The protagonist goes by various names; Jack Long, Longfellow John Long, and embraces the name Jack Lang briefly when someone misheard his name (this is indeed a reference to the NSW Premier of the early 1930s). He is always in the rank of second class: a woolpresser not a shearer, and cane cutter, and a first time seafarer. He sees himself as an equal of his Party leaders, but is denied the corresponding rank due to (after reading between the lines) his anarchist tendencies. Worthy of Glory, ever the underdog; as I describe it. He is a wanderer; an itinerant labourer who is yet to find his place in the world. He bemoans the unoriginality of the Catholic women he meets routinely; who all turn their nose at him once they find out he's a communist, or who try to tame him. He cannot settle down; for before him is the eternal struggle for socialism. At various points he suggests the struggle is eternal and unending; but that he must try anyway, for it is his purpose in life. While the book ends before the Split of 1962, he implies it would become a turning point in his life.
I relate to this novel on a personal level; both Jack's experience's, and his character, are reminiscent of my own. The unending struggle for socialism as life's purpose, the catholic woman attempting to draw us from it, and the lack of recognition for our quality. Through it all; a pervading sense of individuality and loneliness.
January 27, 2022
I’m finding it very hard to enjoy after reading about the author pimping out her young daughters to child abusers. Especially more so after having just finished a couple of books by Eleanor Dark with her beautiful language and relatable characters. Hewett’s writing is cheap and there are very few likeable characters with any redeeming qualities - most of them are quite repulsive and grimy, the language is atrocious. The author’s casual attitude to rape is quite apparent through some off-hand remarks by male characters, who feel that a woman deserves to be raped if she does not “give it up” to a guy after a date, and that a guy who chooses not to rape is automatically a hero.
An awful book about riff-raff by a typical entitled champagne socialist.
An awful book about riff-raff by a typical entitled champagne socialist.
February 20, 2018
I found this little gem of Australian literature in a second hand book sale.
The slice of 1950's industrial Sydney is wonderful. I found the political message is a bit heavy handed but probably echoed the times in which it was written. The episodic nature of the writing was difficult for me, making it hard to invest in any of the characters, but I think this was probably intentional so that the focus was on "womanhood" rather than any particular woman.
The slice of 1950's industrial Sydney is wonderful. I found the political message is a bit heavy handed but probably echoed the times in which it was written. The episodic nature of the writing was difficult for me, making it hard to invest in any of the characters, but I think this was probably intentional so that the focus was on "womanhood" rather than any particular woman.
November 10, 2022
This is listed in the 500 best books by women, and it is a good portrait of women's working conditions- how the union failed them and how much they struggled for a better life. However, each section was about a different woman and after a while I couldn't remember which was which and it was all so bleak! The author seems to regret this book as too naive, she was a young writer, but it didn't bother me, I think she ended the story well.
February 13, 2013
Unions Australia Working Class
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews