The latter was written in Portsea, Melbourne, in a cottage "Imara" made available to writers by Neilma Gantner. A number of less-successful plays were trialled, sometimes in playhouses in country towns. Towards the end of her time in Darlinghurst, she wrote the first volume of her autobiography Wild Card, which covers the years 1923 to 1958. Encouraged by its success, she continued with further works. Later years Hewett moved at the end of 1991 to an old coach house at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. She wrote two moderately successful novels, and a poetry collection Halfway Up the Mountain, but struggled to get new theatre work onto the stage until she wrote the successful play Nowhere, which was staged in 2001. She was disabled by osteoarthritis and was progressively reliant on a wheelchair and then bedridden. Her husband Lilley cared for her into his eighties. She died from recurring breast cancer on 25 August 2002. At the time of her death she was working on the second volume of her autobiography. Literary style and contribution Virtually all encyclopaedias of, and companions to, post-war writing in English and women writers include Hewett as a playwright and poet. According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature, Hewett used "poetry, music and symbol to portray life's paradoxes and her characters' mingling of perception and delusion" while adding "her verse is confessional and romantic in theme, wryly humorous, frankly bawdy, varied in tone and rich in imagery". D'Aeth finds a "dizzying amplitude of styles in her work, beginning with modernism in her early poems through socialist realism to expressionist musical farce, followed by a late response to American poetic experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s", citing her trademark "vivid phantasmagoria and baroque larrikin humour". Even a single play like The Chapel Perilous employs tragedy, farce, naturalism, Brechtian expressionism and musical comedy in quick succession. In fact, Hewett paid scant attention to convention or literary fashion, following her own muse on topics she believed were important. Even during her Realist Writer period, her works were much more passionate and dramatic than was normal for the socialist realism genre. She and Alma De Groen were almost the only female playwrights during the Australian drama renaissance of the 1970s. When most plays of the time were naturalistic along the style of TV dramas, Hewett's plays incorporated allusion, mystery, landscape, poetry, songs and music, with