Dear Dorothy, your passion is stilled: [Late Edition]

Abstract

The celebrated writer Dorothy Hewett died yesterday. Close friend Fay Zwicky penned this tribute.

The celebrated writer Dorothy Hewett died yesterday. Close friend Fay Zwicky penned this tribute.

Dear Dorothy,

They told me that you had died. I find this impossible to believe. You were the Great Survivor, after all. The immortal and indestructible romantic, Rapunzel of the Western Australian wheat belt, Cathy to more than a few Heathcliffs, the "Red Terror of Rottnest", the theatre-stricken, language-drunk girl from Malyalling via Wickepin with the true poetic vocation who, in the Cold War '50s, will morph into Toddy Flood, revolutionary proletarian and joiner of the Communist Party.

Fired with the absolutist religious fervour of your anti-Fascist generation, ready to abandon all (including poetry) for the sacred cause, you wrote a lively social realist novel, Bobbin Up, flogged the Tribune's awful prose on the streets of Sydney; the need to be a communicant at some adored shrine springing from an innocence of a peculiarly Australian kind.

You'll certainly haunt those of us whose lives you've touched, changed and enriched in whichever of your seasons they've encountered you. For better and (since honesty has always been your artistic imperative) sometimes for worse, but always with passionate conviction shot through with redemptive irony.

As obsessed by sex, madness and death as any of the Jacobean playwrights you loved and taught, your headlong autobiographical testament, Wild Card (1990), not only explored your progress from innocence to experience but also investigated the writer's dual nature.

The self who writes and the self who does everything that non-writers do are very closely linked in your work, so much so that it might be imagined that you set out to test those extremities of experience you intended to fathom in fiction, however perilous the consequences. Prudence was never your middle name. Nor were you ever ungenerous about giving yourself away in a mind-boggling proliferation of identities and a sometimes endearingly comic lack of self-awareness.

Let me quote you after yet another rapid dive into a loveless sexual encounter: "What I actually do have is a bad case of hero worship, and besides, Sam has a most uncanny resemblance to my own father."

Or the following breathtaking bit of naivete from a woman who, in my book, has been the most warm and loving mother not only to your own children but to the vast tribe of friends, waifs, strays and lame ducks collected around you all your life. "I have never seen myself as a particularly maternal woman. I have opted for lover rather than child, but I have forgotten to take my own female biology into account."

Was ever a heart so much at risk from the snares set by a restless intelligence as yours!

Wild Card drew together all the mock-heroic roles allotted your heroines in those exciting musical and poetic dramas that I first saw performed on the open-thrust stage of the New Fortune Theatre when we tutored together at the University of Western Australia in the early '60s. Not to forget the various tragi-comic personae played out in your thinly disguised poems and stories that drew on a phenomenal memory bank for concrete particulars and the life of the senses at full stretch in all its beauty and brutality. You let nobody off the hook, least of all yourself.

Like many Australian writers caught in fierce and compelling fantasies of childhood, the difficulties of transposing them into adult passions and obsessions can lay them open to ridicule. This never deterred you, you brave arch-stripper and sacrificial victim to your country's prolonged adolescence.

If there's such a thing as life lived to the full, yours has surely been an overflow, the "great gawk full of grace who staggers forth to make her history" (your words). Six children, 15 plays, eight books of poetry, three novels, an operetta; all distilled from a chaotic, often self-destructive whirl of a life more complex than that of your average utopian romantic. There's a doppelganger at work here, possessed of a penetrating intelligence, always watching with clinical detachment, even when invading family and friends as if at the mercy of a harrowing compulsion to speak.

You yourself said: "I can't remember the exact moment when I became conscious of the divided self. There is the girl who moves and talks and rages and loves, and there is the writer who watches and writes it down, who even in her most passionate moments is saying `Remember this'."

And we do remember, with gratitude and love. Your memories have bequeathed to us a richly animated portrait of an era, an enduring definition of lost innocence informing Australian social history, a time that will never come again.

In your effort to give existential meaning to a poet's life, you charged the landscape of your seedtime with traditional symbols, expanding the dimensions of personal exploration into archetypal experience.

Like your beloved Blake, you found your world in a grain of sand, the sandy soil and windswept dry soaks of the Western Australian wheat belt. As you wrote in an early poem, The Witnesses:

This is the wide country

I lived in when I was young,

The great clouds over it,

The hawk in the high sky hung . . .

Hung upside down like a metal bird,

Fixes time in his fatal eye.

The mice run circles, the plovers cry,

Till I hardly know in that hurt ling sky

Which of the three wild things am I

Murderer, victim, recorded cry.

That your quest has finally given up its meaning, that the wheel has come full circle, that the ghosts of Great Tom Eliot and Dylan Thomas are still beckoning, revealed itself in your last book of poems, Halfway up the Mountain (2001), where the threatening image of that suspended hawk recurs like a nightmarish emblem.

The Hawk in the High Sky Hung speaks of your painful coming to terms with mortality, recognising your beginning in your end. Always the brave confronter, you've looked into the hawk's fatal eye and earned the last word:

joy is something else it is itself

heedless and needing no

commemoration

only a stirring of the senses

a faint memory of that brief time

when we ran through

everlastings

unconscious as a child

on a high hill when the wind blew through us

the hawk hung motionless overhead . . .

and bore the squealing rabbit skyward

struggling by the scruff into a world of cloud

then we became aware of blood

death stared us in the face . . .

It's a new bleak vision needing new tools of survival, your spirit hovering, unflinching as usual:

we are in for the long haul now

the unfathomable patience

the cunning pounce on the word

the phrase the cry in a circle of light

the unfinished manuscript waiting.

(The Prawn Bird)

I hope you didn't go too gentle, old girl. It wouldn't suit you. And besides, we want to remember you as you are, have been, and always will be.

Illustration

Caption: Photo: Always the brave confronter, Dorothy Hewett looked into the hawk's fatal eye and earned the last word. PICTURE: JOE CASTRO