In the two decades that have passed since the original publication of Wild Card, memoir and autobiography have flourished. It is possible to make the argument that much of what might have been considered shocking in Hewett’s 1990 telling is now dwarfed by memoirs such as Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss: A Memoir (1997) or, more recently, Kate Holden’s In My Skin (2006). But the truly shocking or, perhaps more correctly, disturbing aspects of Hewett’s narrative involve the abuse she suffered as a small child from her unhappy mother and the difficulties she faced as a poor, idealistic, creative communist woman throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The cover blurb makes it clear that this book has been ‘republished for a new generation of readers’. Those readers will discover a fascinating mid-twentieth century world of socialism, hardship, discrimination, and political commitment, but they will also discover how women were slaves to their biology; how pregnancies, miscarriages, and abortions were a large and unavoidable part of many women’s lives.

Wild Card is structured around three distinct parts and concludes with an Epilogue set the year before publication. As the second epigraph makes clear, this will be a story of houses – actual and imaginative spaces in which the self might fit. For the most part they will be card houses: fragile, precarious, transient. Broadly speaking they will be the houses of memory that cover childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Hewett begins: ‘The first house sits in the hollow of the heart, it will never go away. It is the house of childhood become myth, inhabited by characters larger than life.’ The lyric beauty of the prose in Part I is astounding. Hewett imbues the landscape of Wickepin with colour, vibrancy, fecundity, and mystery. The farm is a site of wondrous beauty: large draught horses, ‘liquid or wild-eyed’ cows, jostling sheep and dogs, and sun that ‘reflects off the corrugated iron of the shearing shed till it tilts and topples, crazy as a glasshouse. In the chaff house it makes eyes that glitter and run like mice across the floor.’ In a brilliant manoeuvre, Hewett writes in the continuous present tense, thereby imbuing the narrative with an immediacy and energy that captures and sustains the reader’s interest. When the time comes to leave the farm for urban Perth the thirteen-year-old Dorothy packs up her beloved rag dolls and favourite books remarking: ‘I’ll make legends out of this place.’ And we know that indeed she did. That knowledge of Hewett’s later literary success and happier personal life sustains us through the difficult times narrated in this text.

Having survived school, dropped out of university (first time around),  and won the Meanjin poetry prize and the ABC Poetry Competition, Hewett feels spurned in love and attempts suicide at the age of twenty-two. Having barely recovered, she marries Lloyd Davies, noting: ‘The bohemian life is unlivable. It has ended in destruction … Looking for some viable alternative to promiscuity, I have become a wife.’ Through Davies she is introduced to ‘a new circle of intelligent, dedicated Communists’ and so begins a relationship with the Communist Party that will last for twenty-three years and that Hewett will credit with saving her life. ‘I need order in my life. I need a pattern, a systematic view of the world – and Marxism will give it to me.’

The story of Hewett’s involvement with the Communist Party is one of the truly remarkable aspects of this autobiography. Humorously she relates her first attendance at a cottage meeting, dressed in ‘an ice-blue taffeta “ballerina” with high-heeled slingback shoes’. She takes her place among the serious slacks-and-jumpers group and listens to a lecture on communism: ‘I understand very little of what is going on, but they are friendly and dedicated to the Revolution and social justice.’ Hewett devotes the next two decades of her life to the Communist Party. From the late 1940s Australia is governed by the conservative Menzies government. Twice Hewett faces the prospect of arrest and, if the Communist Party is deemed illegal by referendum, imprisonment. Having abandoned Lloyd Davies and their son, Clancy, to run away with Les Flood to the poor streets of Redfern, she becomes a founding member of the Union of Australian Women, rallies the Textile Workers’ Union to demand equal pay for women, serves on the Redfern Tenants’ Protection League, all the while battling poverty, political hostility, and her biology: ‘I face the Petrov Commission as a ludicrous, suspected spy, pregnant again.’

Part III of Wild Card details Hewett’s years with Flood and the birth of their three sons. One narrative strand involves Flood’s descent into madness and the attendant abuse and domestic violence Hewett suffers at his hands. But there is also much love and a number of significant achievements, including a five-month trip to India, Italy, the USSR, and the People’s Republic of China – only three years after its founding. As a child of privilege, Hewett struggles always to prove herself worthy of the Party. Her energy and commitment to the communist cause are immense, but they involvea conscious repression of her personality and literary interests. In writing of an article in which she attacked Ezra Pound and his ‘emotional godchildren’ the Angry Penguins, Hewett admits: ‘I wanted so desperately to believe, and was so afraid of backsliding. I had to attack what I had most loved and admired to make my conversion complete.’ Later she notes: ‘Where is the rebellious girl with the hooped earrings and the black velvet beret … In burying her, have I fragmented my personality so drastically that I have killed the poet in me, traded the gift of tongues for the dream of a Marxist Utopia?’

That creative self could not be silenced. Characters and experiences from throughout this autobiography populate her drama, poetry, and fiction, most obviously in The Chapel Perilous (1971), The Man from Mukinupin (1979), This Old Man Comes Rolling Home (1966), Alice in Wormland (1987), and Bobbin Up (1959). Hewett’s joyous return to writing, after ‘ten silent years’, is facilitated by Khrushchev’s 1956 denouncement of Stalin, whereby ‘some ultimate innocence has been destroyed for ever’.

Autobiographies by their very nature call into question issues to do with memory, truth, and history. Only once in Wild Card does Hewett directly address the veracity of her memories. In admitting to feeling safe for the first time in her life when she entered the USSR, she castigates herself for her naïveté and asks: ‘how can I, in 1990, attempt to remember the dangerous innocence of that first journey; how can I hope, after thirty-eight years, to hold on to that peculiar ardent cast of mind that censored all experience and saw only what it wished to see?’ In 2011 Hewett’s daughter, Kate Lilley, noted that ‘anyone who knew Mum knows that the reliability or otherwise of her stories, oral and written, was highly unpredictable’ (‘In the Hewett Archive’, JASAL). Lilley went on to say that at times she has avoided reading some of her mother’s work ‘precisely because I don’t want to know more than I already do. At other times, reading more and comparing versions has only added to my confusion’.

Read in isolation, Wild Card offers a coherent, convincing life story over thirty-five years. Arguably, the real joy of reading Wild Card arises when it is read in conversation with Hewett’s other works. Like the best writers’ autobiographies, Wild Card elucidates how and why various tropes, images, metaphors, and characters have informed Hewett’s oeuvre.

Hewett’s first chosen epigraph – ‘What does it matter if you do not believe me? The future will surely come. Just a little while and you will see for yourself’ – is taken from Aeschylus’s The Oresteia. Underpinning Hewett’s narrative is a troubled interrogation of the demands of motherhood for an artist. Hewett lays herself bare in Wild Card. She chooses Les Flood and Sydney over her infant son. Then Clancy dies from leukaemia, aged three. Reading how she recited Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to Clancy as she wrestled with her decision to leave him, we appreciate not only how truly constrictive life in suburban middle-class, mid-century Perth must have been for the creative, passionate, unconventional Hewett, but also how Hewett’s personal and intellectual lives are so deeply, productively enmeshed.

Wild Card is the third book in UWA Publishing’s Dorothy Hewett series; it follows the Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett (2010) and Selected Prose of Dorothy Hewett (2011). Unfortunately, a number of wonderful photographs from the earlier edition are omitted here; so too the graphics of the pack of cards, notably the Queen of Hearts. Nevertheless, Wild Card is recommended not only for a new generation of readers keen to discover more about this major Australian writer, but also for readers familiar with Hewett’s work, who will be transported back into the richly intense times and places of Hewett’s lived and imagined worlds.