The Man from Mukinupin

Along with Patrick White, Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) is credited with being a playwright who has produced some of the greatest lyrical epics of Australian life for the stage. The Man from Mukinupin is a quintessential illustration of the Hewett's ability to ‘tell it as she sees it' as it is drawn from her own experiences growing in rural Western Australia with all of its gritty human achievements as well as the darker side of white regional history.

Born in 1923 in Perth, Hewett was a well educated young woman who became a factory worker and Communist Party activist in Sydney (from 1949-59) before turning to writing plays and becoming a writer-in-residence with universities, theatre companies and student groups. She became a playwright after being a successful poet, and much of that lyrical quality she acquired as a poet can be seen in musical language of her plays. Like Brecht, who was also a consummate poet who let his eye linger upon contradiction and the complex motives of social justice, there is an ‘epic' aesthetic to all her stories for the theatre. Hewett uses aspects of Brecht's alienation techniques (or verfremdungseffekts) too by administering shocks to the audience, mainly because she also wanted to stir up the ‘bourgeois complacency' she saw in theatre. Further information on Brecht is available from The Good Woman of Szechwan's Teacher's Notes.

Hewett was an unconventional and restless person who lived her life fully. In 1944, she married a well-to-do lawyer (Lloyd Davies) with whom she had a son who died of leukaemia in infancy. She left her husband for a boilermaker, Les Flood who she followed to Sydney and produced three sons while she worked in mills and as an advertising copywriter. She left Flood after his paranoid schizophrenia became a threat to the young family and returned to Perth where she married Merv Lilley, a former Queensland cane-cutter, Communist, poet and seaman. They had two daughters and have published poetry and verse together since 1962 (The Times).

Hewett wrote plays for all kinds of audiences. In her repertoire there are plays for children (Song of the Seals, 1983); more musicals (Joan, 1975; and a rock opera Pandora's Cross, 1978); a radio play (Susannah's Dreaming, 1980); and many plays that did not adhere to linear narratives (The Chapel Perilous, 1971; Bon-Bons and Roses for Dolly, 1972; The Tatty Hollow Story, 1974; and This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, 1966). All these plays display a ‘freewheeling style' that leaps in time, logic, tone, and convention that epitomises ‘radical' theatre (Williams 271). Margaret Williams suggest Hewett's plays can be placed into two groups: "those that are intensely personal and autobiographical that deal with sexual and family relationships (up to the late 1970s) and those from the mid-70s that ‘assert the need for imaginative cherishing of the Australian cultural landscape". The Man from Mukinupin is undoubtedly a hybrid of both these phases in Hewett's writing.