gloves for the first time, a shock after her ragamuffin life on the farm. As a painfully shy country girl, she was known as "Hermit Hewett". She excelled at English and received the State Exhibition award in English in 1941. To assist his talented daughter, her father took her to a meeting of the Fellowship of Australian Writers. Hewett enrolled at the University of Western Australia (UWA) in 1942, where she participated eagerly in university life. She won the national Meanjin poetry award that year, aged 17. With several friends she founded the University Drama Society and acted in a number of Repertory plays, including a melodrama that she wrote herself. She received high distinctions in English, but failed French for several years and did not graduate. Realist writer period and the Communist Party After leaving UWA, Hewett worked in a bookshop and as a cadet journalist with the Perth Daily News, but lost both these jobs. She rejected the lifestyle and aspirations of her wealthy parents and eventually joined the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). She briefly edited the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star. Dozens of articles authored by Dorothy Hewett appear in the Worker's Star from 1945 to 1947. Recuperating after an attempted suicide following a failed wartime relationship, she wrote the poem Testament, her first mature work, which won the prestigious ABC Poetry Prize in 1945. On the rebound, she married the Party lawyer Lloyd Davies that year and their child Clancy was born in 1947. After World War II she briefly re-enrolled at UWA and became editor of the university journal, Black Swan, soon nicknamed "Red" Swan. Her enthusiasm was such that she kept the journal 'politically pure' by writing most of the contents herself under various noms de plume. The authorities banned it from distribution in any other Australian university. Hewett covered the 1946 Pilbara Strike for the Worker's Star, and wrote the epic ballad, Clancy and Dooley and Don McLeod, which cemented her position as a radical author and a supporter of Indigenous rights. However, she then virtually discontinued writing for a life of activism and child-rearing. In 1949 she fell in love with the boilermaker Les Flood, and eloped with him to Sydney, to live in the inner-city suburb of Redfern. The CPA strongly disapproved of what they called immoral behaviour and she had to restart at the bottom, selling the Communist