A school and university student in Perth, Western Australia, during World War II, Dorothy Hewett was one of the few poets to write with modernist immediacy about Australia’s home front. She also wrote about the war in numbers of her plays and in her memoir Wild Card (1990), where she bewailed, using the book’s self-mocking, perpetual present-tense, that “the war has swallowed up all my boyfriends…”. Hewett’s war was a rollercoaster of interpersonal discord, while northern Western Australia was bombed, Perth evacuated, and occupying Yanks welcomed. All three of her later husbands saw active service and were subject to surveillance as communists: two of them were court-martialled. After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Hewett herself joined the still-illegal communist party in her suburban branch.

Australia’s intellectual communities confronted the immediate crises by asking broader questions of the purpose and moral identity of Australia as a nation - what would be lost if the country was invaded? Isolated Perth too vaunted a cultural front, though not perhaps as Sartre would recognise such. Hewett’s role in it, as a rebellious young woman refusing war’s constraints, while writing for a national readership, gives us an unconventional lens through which to refract larger histories.