Wild Card: An Autobiography, 1923-1958

In this autobiography, Dorothy Hewett, an Australian playwright and poet, seeks to create a sense of people, place and political history. Born in Perth in 1923, the daughter of a wheat farmer, she spent her early years roaming the land and battling with her mother. After university, three failed love affairs, an attempted suicide and a major poetry prize, Dorothy Hewett joined the Australian Communist Party in 1945. Four years later she met her first husband and travelled to Sydney with her lover, a boilermaker. Life in the working-class suburbs - where "the air is breathless with soot and smog and the knock-off whistle from the brewery, the print factory and the glassworks punctuate the day" - provided the basis for her novel, "Bobbin' Up".