Dorothy Hewett

The Frank Hardy I Knew

Dear Editor,

Frank Hardy was a larrikin. It was probably one of his most endearing qualities, but he did tell me once that his membership of the Australian Communist Party enabled him to become something more than a larrikin. He didn’t always pay his debts, except for the one big debt and the only one worth remembering: the debt of living, to the end, a writer’s life. For a boy brought up amongst working-class Irish Catholics in the potato belt in Victoria, that was no mean feat.

In Tracy Ryan’s poems there are no safe houses, the walls of domesticity keep falling in and she is the clear-eyed tightrope walker negotiating a perilous foothold. Her lines zigzag across the page:

His extract from the 1940 New Zealand Police Gazette reproduced on the back cover of this splendidly designed biography acts as a striking metaphor for the life and times of Noel Counihan, artist and revolutionary.

The image of the woman imprisoned in a tower is recurrent in Dorothy Hewett’s work. In the early poem, ‘Grave Fairytale’, Hewett refashions the figure of Rapunzel to signify the woman poet whose writing depends on isolation and the suppression of her sexuality.