Workers Online
Workers Online
Workers Online
  Issue No 31 Official Organ of LaborNet 17 September 1999  

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Review

Bobbin' Up - 40 Years On


Forty years after its first publicaton and several European translations Bobbin Up, a classic of industrial fiction, is coming home.

The first ever Australian reprint of Bobbin Up is being published by The Vulgar Press to celebrate the 40 years since the first edition.

The present edition contains a corrected text of the first edition and includes a new introduction by the author as well as her introduction to the 1985 Virago edition.

Stephen Knight's important essay, 'Bobbin Up and the Working-Class Novel' and Nathan Hollier's look at the 40 years of Bobbin Up's critical reception are also included to make this edition appeal to both casual and scholarly readers.

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Dorothy Hewett, born in 1923 in Perth, Western Australia, was bought up on an isolated sheep and wheat farm, educated by correspondence and later at Perth College and the University of Western Australia.

She worked as a journalist on the Perth Daily News and the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star. Shifting to Sydney, she worked for one year as a mill hand and for two years as a advertising copywriter, then, back in Perth, for nine years as an English tutor at the University of Western Australia.

Her first full length public work was Bobbin Up in 1959, based on her experiences in the Alexandria spinning mill in Sydney, and nine years living in the inner city suburbs with a boilermaker named Les Flood and their three young sons.

Bobbin Up was first published by the left wing cooperative, The Australasian Book Society, translated into five European languages and republished in English by Seven Seas Books (Berlin) and the feminist publishers Virago. Since that time she has published 13 plays, 9 poetry collections, an autobiography and a second novel. Her twenty three year membership of the Australian Communist Party ended when the Russians marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968.

She has an AM for services to Australian literature, a Doc. Litt. from the University of Western Australia, and a lifetime Emeritus Grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts. She now lives in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney with her husband the writer Merv Lilley. They have two daughters.

For more information contact Ian Syson phone (03) 9348 2140 fax (03) 9348 or mailto:[email protected]


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*   View entire issue - print all of the articles!

*   Issue 31 contents

In this issue
Features
*  Interview: Sadly Vindicated
Labor�s foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton has spent the past year warning that East Timor would explode without a UN peacekeeping force. Now he�s had to watch his predictions come true.
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*  International: In the Bunker
One of the last reporters to leave East Timor, Workers Online's HT Lee remembers the week that Dili burned.
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*  Republic: Tarred With the Same Brush
Neville Wran asks why it is that the most fervant monarchists are also the most eager union-bashers.
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*  Unions: Hard Labour
Prisoner educators argue more attention needs to be given to rehabilitation through teaching, but they�re facing an uphill battle to convince authorities.
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*  History: Labour and Community
A history conference in Wollongong next month will look at the changing role for labour into the next century.
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*  Review: Bobbin' Up - 40 Years On
Forty years after its first publicaton and several European translations Bobbin Up, a classic of industrial fiction, is coming home.
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*  Satire: East Timor Poll Triumph: Support for Jakarta Up 21 Per Cent
The Indonesian Government has declared that it is pleased with the result of the independence referendum in which 21% of East Timorese voted in support of maintaining links with Indonesia.
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News
»  Asylum Call for Independence Supporters
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»  Nurses Collect Vital Medical Supplies
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»  Industrial Faction for Pre-Conference Caucus
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»  Lees Backs Freeloader Laws
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»  Outsourcing Decision - Banks Under the Gun
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»  Reith Forces Truckies to Speed
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»  He Talks the Talk - But Can He Walk the Walk?
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»  Commission Tells AGC to Get Into the Nineties
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»  Cost-Cutting Puts Clinical Waste in Landfill
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»  Prisons Reject Free Computers
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»  US Defence Giant Eyes Welfare Sector
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Columns
»  Guest Report
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»  Sport
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»  Trades Hall
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»  Piers Watch
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Letters to the editor
»  TWU Wrong on Union Bans
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»  A Lukewarm Republic
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»  Compo Premium Cheats Should be Policed
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»  Destroying Education
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