Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002)

Set in working class Redfern, Sydney, in the late 50s, this follows a group of women working long hours in the local woollen mill.
There are oldies, fighting to keep an income going...young wives trying to provide for the family, maybe raise them up the ladder...and flighty teens with ambitions, romances ...and unwanted pregnancies.
A different experience in every chapter, yet all rely on the lowly wage they receive. But as the textile industry faces a downturn and redundancies loom, the women come together in a stand-off under their "Commie" colleague, Nell..
I've read a couple of authors who tried to inject left wing politics into a story.....John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair spring to mind- and it CAN rapidly get preachy and feel like a bit of propaganda. I didnt find that fault at all with Bobbin Up (the title, incidentally, being the name of the works newspaper.) The place and the people are SO vividly drawn, that when politics comes into it, towards the end, it feels entirely justified. And nowhere do we have any asides from the author, telling us what we should be thinking....
Quite brilliant writing.… (more)

The novel, set in the hot Southern Hemisphere summer of 1957, with Sputnik 1 visible in the sky, shows us vignettes from the lives of a group of women who all work in a spinning mill in Sydney. They are of different ages and from different social situations, each has her own hopes and fears and problems to resolve, and none gets significantly more space in the book than any other: this is a proper collective, social-realist novel. There's a character who is presumably autobiographical, the union rep who has written the satirical pamphlet Bobbin up to warn her fellow-workers about what their employers are up to, and has to defend its informal style of political analysis to the orthodox Marxist-Leninists in the local Party branch.

You could call this "Germinal with better weather", because of the way it pays close attention to the real conditions that the working-class characters live in, including the ways they try to have fun, and the way we are obviously building up to a big confrontation with the employers, but Hewett cleverly chooses to end the story with the women uniting to take on the bosses (and the official union leadership, who as usual are happy to sacrifice the women to protect the interests of male skilled workers). The outcome of the dispute isn't relevant to the point Hewett wants to make, so she prefers to go out on a note of optimism. And why not?

I enjoyed this: lively, well-written and full of local atmosphere, with a lot of real sympathy for characters who might otherwise be rather difficult to like. It's obvious that these aren't representative cases or political symbols for Hewett, but real friends she's worked with.… (more)

Set in Sydney, Australia, in the late 1950s, Bobbin Up is actually a collection of vignettes about the young women who work in the Jumbuck spinning mills. They are, as the cliché goes, overworked and underpaid, and each “chapter” focuses on the story of a different girl, among them a pregnant teenager and a Communist idealist. The title’s double entendre is cunning—the bobbins of spinning, as well as the idealistic acting of “bobbing up” out of one’s own circumstances, to do something about an unfavorable situation (hence the title of the pamphlet that’s passed around at the mill).

There is a kind of idealism to the tone of the book, as well as an interest in the “human condition.” The author wrote the preface for the Virago edition of the book, in which she is a little bit embarrassed by her naiveté at the time of writing. Dorothy Hewett was an unmarried woman much like some of the women in the book, but like many she was laid off from work for being married (she was the sole financial support for her children and their father).

She explores the irony of her situation through detailing the tribulations of the girls in this book and the political implications of their actions. Hewett went and asked for a job in “the worst mill in Sydney” and began working for the Communist party. Later on, while researching material for the novel, she took walks through some of Sydney’s worst neighborhoods—the kinds of places in which Shirl, Nell, Patty, Beryl, Beth, and the others would have lived. The detailed stories of the girls’ everyday lives seem unrelated at first, but they are related to a much larger social and political construct.

The novel is littered with pop references; Sputnik is on the horizon; the text is sprinkled with the lyrics from popular songs of the late 1950s. Even the neighborhoods the characters live in are time-specific. It shows that not only do the events of the characters’ beliefs but that they’re also a product of the time period. But sometimes things don’t change. Compare this novel with the likes of The Roaring Nineties, another Australian novel that focuses on the working class. They take place 60 years apart, and in different parts of the country, but they still deal with the same topics and concerns.… (more)