"Come here, child" - the sexual abuse of Kate and Rozanna Lilley

The abuse of Kate & Rozanna Lilley | Pandora's Cross 1978

Kate and Rozanna Lilley, 2018.

Warning: The following material deals with sexual abuse, paedophilia, rape, pornography and trauma suffered by two female adolescents (aged 10-19) / teenagers (aged 13-19). The initial events occurred during the 1970s and were publically revealed through the media (newspapers, magazines and television) during 2018. The various accounts presented below are as originally published, with no amendations. The story of Kate and Rozanna Lilley reveals the reality of under-age and coming-of-age, 'consensual' and non-consensual sex, giving rise to long-term trauma. On a broader level, it highlights the down side of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, a subject most recently addressed in Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (2022).

"Come here, child...."

Introduction

On 9 June 2018 The Australian newspaper published interviews with Kate and Rozanna Lilley, daughters of the famous Australian author Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) and her writer husband Merv Lilley (1919-2016). The interviews referred to the daughters’ under-age and coming-of-age sexual encounters will older men during the late 1970s, naming the late writer and political commentator Bob Ellis, artist Martin Sharp and British photographer David Hamilton. Those other males living at the time (2018) who engaged in sexual encounters with the girls were not named. In the wake of the international #MeToo movement and Australia’s own Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2012-17), there was a heightened reaction to the revelations. The more recently revelations around British paedophile Jimmy Saville and American Jeffrey Epstein highlighted the abhorrence regarding the ongoing scourge within Western society that is paedophilia and predatory sex with adolescents / teenagers. Despite the complex narrative presented during 2018 by the Lilley women in their original statements, some media reports concentrated on the more salacious elements, proclaiming the presence of an ‘Australian arts paedophile ring’ and placing blame on various individuals. A reading of the statements reveals elements of the contemporary context and, more importantly, the subsequent struggle of the women to come to terms with the trauma suffered as a result of the often predatory and abusive sexual and psychological behaviours they encountered in their youth. Reproduced below are copies of media reports from 2018, plus other material of relevance. The material is arranged chronologically.

Events in the lives of Kate and Rozanna Lilley

1960

– Kate Lilley born, daughter of Dorothy Hewitt and Merv Lilley.

1962

– Rozanna (Rose) Lilley born, second child of Dorothy Hewitt and Merv Lilley.

1976

– May: National Playwrights Conference, Canberra. Dorothy Hewett’s play The Golden Oldies is work-shopped and subsequently opens in Melbourne in January 1977.

- June: The Australian feature Journey Among Women is filmed on the Hawkesbury River and around Sydney. Actors include 13 year old Rose Lilley as the girl Emily who is ultimately raped and murdered. For a detailed description of the film and its shooting, including photographs from the set, see here: http://www.ozmovies.com.au/movie/journey-among-women. Dorothy Hewett was one of the scriptwriters, and Merv Lilley also appeared in the film. It was released the following year and stands as an often brutal depiction of the fate of convict women in Australia during the early colonial period.

Rose Lilley in Journey Among Women, 1976.

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1977

* 7 August 1977, Sunday Mirror, Sydney.

Naked girl, 13, in film row.

Report on the appearance of Rose Lilley in the Australian film Journey Among Women, following its release. Lilley was almost 15 by the time the story appeared.

A 13 year old Sydney girl who ran wild and naked in the bush to make a movie is the centre of a child welfare storm. In making one sensational scene the girl, Rose Lilley, became so drunk she collapsed in a stupor in front of the camera….

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* 1 September 1977, Filmnews. Report on the Australian film Journey Among Women.

Journey Among Women

Journey Among Women, director: Tom Cowan, producer: John Weiley, camera: Tom Cowan, script: Weiley Cowan and Dorothy Hewett.

What can you say about a personal film, with dramatic elements painfully superimposed, being promoted as a risqué piece of colonial history? Simply that as commercial cinema, Journey Among Women fails and, in failing, it caters to exactly those interests it might have sought to counter. Journey Among Women began as an experimental (in terms of cast roles rather than film technique), low-budget film. There was some possibility that it might be used as the basis for a feature length commercial production (see Filmnews, December 1976), but this was abandoned for perhaps two main reasons. First, the difficulty in procuring finance for the project and secondly, because as an experiment in group relations, it simply couldn't be duplicated. Its transformation from 'art film' to commercial production left at least some cast members in a professional vacuum - they had gone into it on a minimal pay basis and subsequently had to fight for award wages and a percentage as a reward for their part in both the creation of the story, and its realisation. But this notwithstanding, their participation in the film had, initially at least, little to do with remuneration. It was seen as an opportunity "for women to work together - for women to make a statement". The story was seen as being about "a group of strong women" and about "relations between the sexes". In other words, the story was seen as being entirely contemporary, and the convict theme merely something on which to hang it. For Theresa, "everything I was in that film was myself. I had never done any acting and that was the only way I could play it." She cited her major disagreement with director, Tom Cowan, as being over whether or not her character, and that played by Di Fuller, would have to die in the last sequence. Both refused to allow their characters to be killed. This degree to which characters were felt to be personal was reaffirmed in comments on the convicts' escape from the cell. Several of the women remarked that they felt they really were escaping from some form of confinement. More precisely, they were escaping from the director of the actors' workshops. Some say he lost control at that point and the women took over. Whatever the reasons, he left the project then. Says Di - "when we were locked up they controlled us." After the escape, some began to direct themselves.

As a story, Journey Among Women deals with a group of convict women who escape the colony, along with a judge's daughter, become tribalised, with the help of a Black woman, and, until the end, elude capture. This story-line aside, the theme is basically contemporary and infuriatingly confusing, because much of the start of the film is convincing historical drama. As convicts, all the women are believably filthy, leering, foul-mouthed, ruined and defiant. When the judge's daughter, Elisabeth Harrington enters their cell, playing lady bountiful, the child Emily crawls to her to touch her fine clothes in awe. Torn away by one of the others she is later admonished - "We don't serve no frilly bitches." Emily's longings, plus the rape scenes, are the most memorable pieces in the film. But by contrast, the scenes of the colonial powers at leisure are ludicrously shallow. Described as being "like an actor on an empty stage" by one of the cast, these scenes are simply vacuous. With a mixed opening as a dramatic film, the cast of Journey Among Women is, at the start, convincingly cockney or colonial. Half an hour later, in the bush, these former convicts sound and behave exactly as contemporary Australian women. Gone are the accents and mannerisms of the past. As an analogy this fails. The confusion looks like nothing more than bad continuity, especially since the soldiers and other men remain in period mode. This is further exacerbated by the lack of formal characterisation. Because the tribe is treated as a group, the viewer loses any sense of identification with, or sympathy for, any member. Jude likens the portrayal of the tribe to a football scrum. As soon as you identify anyone they disappear back into the scrum for a while. Similarly annoying is the introduction of Lillian Crombie as the Aboriginal woman who teaches the former convicts survival. Curiously, the script handles the issue better. It depicts the women coming across a tribe of Aborigines. Subsequently they are joined by one member of the tribe who aids them. Understandably, the acquisition of a full tribe might have constituted a severe logistical problem on a low-budget production, but the solution looks depressingly cardboard replica.

Anyone with the most minimal concern for the current image of women must feel disillusioned at the seamy way in which Journey Among Women has been, and is being, promoted. Commenting, in group discussion, on her own interview with Jim Oram (Daily Mirror), Jude Kuring noted that all he seemed to be interested in was "nudity and lesbianism, nudity and lesbianism, ... lesbianism and nudity.". Someone interrupted - "I think he was more interested in the nudity than the lesbianism", and another "He was hoping to get to the lesbianism through the nudity." He wasn't the only one. Particularly vicious was The Sunday newspaper's piece on the participation of [13 year old] Rose Lilley. Rose's mother, Dorothy Hewett, was a co-writer of the original script and Rose's participation in the production had the parental nod. Nevertheless, The Sunday managed to stir up some flak with the Child Welfare Department, insinuating that her juvenile innocence had been tainted by participation in the film. In fact, press coverage prior to the opening night ran the gamut of grubby awe at supposed lesbianism and nudity on screen to a farcical concern with trivia. Since then, however, the reception has changed, with reviewers who have looked past the superficial elements reacting coldly towards the film. The worst thing about the film is simply that it should have been so much better. The cinematography is generally beautiful, the story could have been the same, as director Tom Cowan has an impressive record in the treatment of female themes, within both The Office Picnic and The Promised Woman. Because it is neither a drama, nor a personal film, Journey Among Women falls into a stylistic void. For many viewers, lesbianism and nudity will be the two most recognisable facets of the film, with its good aspects overshadowed by the confusion.

This review was preceded by a discussion with cast members: Di Fuller, Theresa Jack, Jude Kuring, Kay Sell, Rose Lilley. Postscript: The book Journey Among Women, written by Diana Fuller, will be published by Sun Books, through MacMillan and released shortly.

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Rozanna Lilley in her teens, circa 1977. Source: Flickr.

1978

* 1978 – Kate and Rose Lilley take part in the filming of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

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* 28 June 1978 – Premiere of Dorothy Hewett’s play Pandora’s Cross at the Paris Theatre, Sydney. Poster by Martin Sharp. A positive review is published in Theatre Australia by Bob Ellis.

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1985

* 5 July 1985, Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Tait. Student Drama Declines – story on the Sydney University Dramatic Society (SUDS), including reference to 23 year old Rozanna Lilley’s role in the play Forget Thebes.

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1990

20 December 1990, Sydney Morning Herald, Jennie Curtin. The All in the Family event.

A literary family let loose

The Australian literary world has had its fair share of talented family teams over the years: Katharine Susannah Prichard and her playwright son, Ric Throssell; poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker) and her son, Vivian; novelist Jessica Anderson and scriptwriter daughter, Laura Jones. But the family headed by Dorothy Hewett, playwright, poet and novelist, has taken the concept a step further and virtually fills the household with writers. Dorothy, at 67, has nine published plays, five collections of poetry, a novel and an autobiography behind her. Her husband, Merv Lilley (who bestows the title "head of the family" on Dorothy), is thrice-published, including a joint book of poetry with Dorothy and Git Away Back, his collection of bush yarns, poems and philosophies. Her son, Tom Flood, is the author of Oceana Fine (his first novel) which won the Vogel Award in 1988 and both the Miles Franklin Award and the Victorian Premier's Prize for fiction this year. And her daughter Kate Lilley, with a PhD in English, is an accomplished poet widely published in journals and magazines and winner of awards including the Henry Lawson Award. In January, at the Sydney Writers Festival, the four will join forces for the first time for a public reading, appropriately titled "All in the family" . The impetus for the joint effort came from Tom, who was partly inspired by memories of past performances by Dorothy and Merv (his stepfather), particularly one at the Belvoir Street Theatre about five years ago.

"I liked what happened in between the reading of the words," he said. "There was a bit of sniping, general family talk. The audience liked it a lot. It was kind of like sitting around the kitchen table with a couple of writers." Kate describes it as a bit of repartee between two "old hams", and Dorothy doesn't disagree. "She and Merv have been reading poetry since the '60s, when the fashion first hit the cafes, coffee shops and pubs. "We were part of all that, even though we were a lot older than everyone else, so we've, had a lot of years of it," Dorothy said. Merv describes himself as a reciter, rather than a reader. Kate has childhood recollections of him always reciting ballads and Dorothy claims he knows more poems or bits of poems than anyone in the world. Born in the bush, Merv started writing in the Central Queensland Herald when he was just seven, under the rather grand pseudonym "Man of the mountains".

Kate was another early starter - first published in a journal at the age of 14, and Rosie, the youngest of Dorothy's five children (three by Les Flood arid two by Merv) wrote a play when she was nine which, was performed in Sydney by the Australian Theatre of Young People. Tom, on the other hand, started only five years ago when he was 30. He had played in bands and written songs before deciding to give prose "a bash". The "bash" produced five or six short stories, one of which was published, then the award-winning Oceana Fine. The family didn't see a word of that until it was finished but then "worked it over pretty well", according to Tom, and prompted a lot of rewriting. Literary criticism has keen another family trait. They all read each other's works and don't hold back on saying just what they feel, although Kate admits that the children were usually "more savage". The opening nights of her mother's new plays were sometimes difficult when, as they gathered at home afterwards, it was time for honest reaction. But the no-holds-barred approach didn't suit Merv. He chose a safer path and kept quiet. "A good rule in a literary family is to say nothing," he said.

The All In The Family reading will be held in the Glass House Cafe in the State Library of New South Wales on Wednesday, 23 January from 6 to 8 pm.

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1993

* 29 May 1993, Sydney Morning Herald. Interview with Dorothy Hewitt.

Wild at Heart

The Toucher is only Hewett's second novel, on top of 13 plays, four collections of poetry, and the first volume of her autobiography. "I fell in love with the theatre, its glamour and pain and collective life, so I made a deliberate decision to concentrate on writing plays and abandoned several novels I'd started," she says. "Now I'm back to novels with a vengeance." After 18 years of living in Sydney's inner city, Hewett and Merv Lilley last year moved to the Blue Mountains. They found an old sandstone cottage with a wide veranda, an overgrown garden with persimmon and magnolia trees, iris, lavender, and crisp clean air. It's a remarkable contrast to her home of the previous nine years in Kings Cross, with the massage parlour next door, prostitutes high on heroin sitting on her doorstep, and police sirens wailing through the night. "At midnight you'd hear the clatter of the prostitutes' high heels in the back lane, ironically called Wisdom Lane, and clicking up the flights of stairs to the parlour rooms. The deros would sit in the gutter amid the syringes, drinking their metho, and people in new high-rise apartments gazed down on it all. Sometimes a naïve looking country girl would knock on our front door inquiring if this was the massage parlour where she could get work. It became so depressing, we had to leave. Our daughter, Kate Lilley, who's a lecturer in English at Sydney University, lives there with a friend now, but they see it through different eyes."

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1995

* Dorothy Hewett, Halfway Up the Mountain, 2001. Contains the verse Daughter, written around 1995, about her daughter Rozanna, both as a young 15 year old, but also as an older woman.

Daughter

Our daughter is fifteen she is beautiful she walks home through the dangerous streets at 3 am ordering the flasher to put that thing away.

She used to line up her dolls for lectures dawdling home from school under the street trees she talked to a cast of imaginary characters.

When she was five she was the mascot at the school sports marching proudly in blue shorts & a halter top it was a cold day & she had an asthma attack.

At twelve she was Mrs Pankhurst in O What a Lovely War under a big black picture hat like a mushroom she delivered inflammatory feminist speeches she made a giant green cardboard crocodile it lived in her attic laying its dreamy snout on the window sill it watched the traffic its long tail switching in the dust.

She came home when she left her lovers standing at the upstairs window aloof with tears her red bikini underpants stuffed in her raincoat pocket.

Our daughter got married in second-hand white organza with dozens of soiled covered buttons (she cleaned each one with a toothbrush) it rained for days & the wedding dress hung sodden in the bathroom like a hanged bride it took my breath away with false silver fingernails & contact lenses frangipani in her lacquered hair-do she floated down through the park to the thin dark handsome bridegroom in his stovepipe trousers.

Our daughter is thirty-three she is visiting the Hong Kong Film Festival she has left her husband lost eight kilos & wears a mini-skirt when she gives a lecture at Macau University the Vice-Chancellor snickers pretty lady you got doctorate?;

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The Lilley sisters’ parents Merv Lilley and Dorothy Hewett at their Blue Mountains home shortly before Hewett’s death in 2002.

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2014

* 11 January 2014, The Age, Melbourne. Rozanna Lilley published the following anonymous poem in memory of Martin Sharp, who had died in Sydney on 1 December 2013. It refers to her sexual encounter with him around 1977 at Sharp’s Sydney property Wirian, when she was 15 and he 35, along with a subsequent encounter there when Lilley sought to ignite a romance with the aging artist.

Mickey Mouse romance

Standing on the long drive

Imelda snapping at your heels

I’ve returned

I’d like to see the bedroom upstairs but it feels impolite

Your mansion is crumbling

Obsessively layering paint as though time has no conclusion

There’s nothing to eat

Back then you peeled my boots, reverently

Decades between us

I was limp, sheets crumpled with dappled sunlight and despair

Paraded at parties

Exhibited to Tiny Tim

A collector’s piece

I stole loose change [from] my mother's purse

Caught a taxi

To ask if you maybe wanted to do it again

You are the only one who has ever said sorry

Rozanna Lilley.

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2015

* 4 March 2015, autobiographical prose by Rozanna Lilley regarding aspects of her early sexual encounters and bohemian upbringing.

Bitter Pill – I needed protection, not the Pill.

When I was fourteen-years-old, my mother [Dorothy Hewett] suggested I should go on the Pill. I have a grainy snapshot of the moment filed away under ‘pivotal childhood events’. We were sitting in the living room of my parents’ Woollahra terrace. Mum, as was often the case, reclined regally on the gold sofa. It was her favourite salon pose. My father [Bert Lilley], a giant of a man barely contained within the door-frame, glowered. I hovered anxiously between. We made an awkward triangle. Dad was caught between wanting to protect his youngest daughter and his disdain for convention. Mum was a sexual libertarian who trusted I would follow her lead. Certainly I was pleased to be offered a free pass to adulthood. ‘Do you expect her to be a vestal virgin forever?’ Mum reprimanded Merv. She had a way of cutting off arguments through sheer force of personality. And that was that. I was sent up the street to a female doctor who had no hesitation in writing the script. It was 1977. I’m not sure whether Mum knew that I had first had sex earlier that year with an aspiring poet nine years my senior. He promised to be ‘careful’. Later there were others. Our house was a gathering place for the 70s arts scene in Sydney – actors and poets, artists and musicians came in and out. Flagons of cheap booze were consumed as ideas were discussed, records tossed on the turntable and gossip traded. Intense affairs and casual sex were commonplace. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference. Certainly teenage pregnancy was a valid concern. When I look back on those times, I try to do so with a sense of forgiveness. Many people believe I am lucky to have grown up in such an open household surrounded by so many talented people. Often my ‘precocity’ is mentioned. Insiders comment that our family seemed to be living outside the rules and their tone suggests a mix of awe and envy. Both of my parents are frequently remembered for their kindness and their hospitality. To understand my mother, I think about the restrictions she experienced during the course of her career as a radical and a writer. She rebelled against what she perceived to be a puritanical Protestant upbringing. Sadly, she often expressed an intense dislike of her own bourgeois mother, and denigrated her for choosing abstinence after her two daughters were born. Instead, Dorothy professed a passion for sex. In her autobiography, Wild Card, she breathlessly wrote ‘To be joined to another human being seems to me the ultimate mystery’ (p.92). As part of this naive libertarianism, she also rejected censorship of any kind. When Midnight Cowboy was released around 1970, she took my sister and me along to it. She was enraged when the cinema refused to let minors into this X‐rated movie. Her own life, like that of other women of her generation, was powerfully shaped by lack of contraceptive choices. She had six children and many abortions. At my first wedding, she announced to the party that I, her last child, was lucky to be born. ‘I had already had an abortion that year, and couldn’t face another one’ she boldly told the assembled company. Mum loved to outrage. Styling herself as a bohemian feminist (complete with beret), when Mum offered me the Pill she doubtless believed that she was offering freedom. But looking back on this in my 50s, that freedom seems, at best, illusory for someone so young, and, at worst, as just another way of propping up a predatory patriarchal sexual economy. I was first sexually assaulted, by a builder, in my own bedroom at age 11. He promised me chocolate if I would let him do more than fondle my incipient breasts and rub between my legs. My mother was worried for me when I told her, but she also tried to minimise the assault, telling me that European men are often ‘friendly’. In these ways, we learn to be silent. Later, at 13, two different family friends groomed and, as the expression goes, ‘felt me up’ during the course of a family holiday. Both men told me I was amazing and beautiful. I believed them and kept ‘our’ secrets. By the time I was 14 and in need of the Pill, I had been schooled in both sexual deception and in accepting responsibility for, as well as courting, men’s desires. Indeed, Mum always told me that the worst thing a woman could be was a ‘prick‐teaser’. My mother did not intentionally hurt me. But neither did she protect me. She had a pretty good idea of what was going on in her own house and she imaginatively recast these predations as adventures, confirming our familial superiority to restrictive moral norms. Almost forty years later, I am still trying to come to terms with that carelessly broken girlhood.

Rozanna Lilley 2015

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2018

* 9 June 2018, The Australian, Rosemary Neill. Groundbreaking article revealing the sexual abuse during the late 1970s of Kate and Rozanna Lilley.

Rozanna and Kate Lilley, circa 1977. Source: The Australian.

Mum’s men used us for under-age sex, say Dorothy Hewett’s daughters

When Dorothy Hewett died in 2002, glowing obituaries described the playwright, poet and mother of six as a “warm and formidable” friend and an “untamed earth mother.’’ Hewett’s adult daughters, Rozanna Lilley and Kate Lilley, have some jarringly different memories - especially when it comes to the radical sexual mores of the 1970s bohemian arts scene in which their mother was immersed. In extraordinarily frank interviews, the daughters have told The Weekend Australian that Hewett was so “damaged”, “fucked up”, and lacking in “moral boundaries” that she “encouraged” and “facilitated” their early sexualisation within that predatory scene. Kate, a respected poet and an associate professor of English at Sydney University, said that during the 1970s, the family’s terrace home in Sydney’s east was “unbearable’’ and “as an acquaintance says - like a brothel without payment.” “There were constantly men staying in the house and hardly any (heterosexual) man came to the house who didn’t try to have sex with one or more of us (Kate, Rozanna or Dorothy),’’ Kate revealed. She alleged that a visiting poet who raped her when she was 15 [1975], went on to have relationships with her mother and sister. She told her mother about the alleged rape but “she didn’t believe me.’’ Kate and Rozanna also alleged that, among a long list of male artists who assaulted, exploited or had under-age sex with them, were celebrated writer and film director Bob Ellis; leading pop artist Martin Sharp and British erotic photographer David Hamilton. These men are dead - Hamilton committed suicide in 2016 following child-rape allegations - but the sisters said other artists who abused them were still alive and working. Rozanna, an author and academic researcher, said her mother was known as a “female Don Juan” and “would often say that the greatest thing in life was sex.’’ From adolescence onwards, she and her sister “became quite keen to get involved with all of this, because that is what she encouraged us to do’’. By the time the sisters turned 16 [1976 and 1978 respectively], the legal age of consent, Kate had slept with six men and Rozanna with “at least a dozen.’’

In a remarkable coincidence, the sisters have written about these scarring experiences in new, strikingly different books: Kate’s poetry collection Tilt, refers to the under-age sex, a sexual assault by a film producer and the rape by the poet that she allegedly endured. Rozanna’s book, Do Oysters Get Bored? is a “hybrid” of essays and poems that document her “carelessly broken girlhood’’ and her current life as the devoted mother of an autistic son. Tom Flood, a Miles Franklin literary award winner and the women’s half-brother, said his mother “believed in children’s rights’’ and that “covered a wide range’’. He mostly lived in Western Australia in the 1970s, but “I knew there’d been quite a bit of under-age (sexual) stuff involving (his sisters and) quite a few people, some of whom are quite respected’’. He added that while his mother “put them (his sisters) into that milieu … I would sheet home any blame to the men involved. They were the times, and men were taking advantage of it.’’ He also revealed that the poet who allegedly raped Kate, later forced anal sex on his mother during their affair. This had “shocked’’ her. “She didn’t call that rape - I did,’’ he said.

Kate claimed she had consensual sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16. Rozanna said that when she was 14, Ellis “shoved my hands down the front of his trousers.” She said she had sex with Sharp - then the country’s leading pop artist - when she was 15. At 14, she met Hamilton at a Sydney hotel for what she assumed would be a modelling shoot. Instead, he took topless shots of her before “he took photographs of my vagina - close-ups.’’ The younger Lilley daughter had previously appeared naked in a feature film. At 13, she performed nude and in a sex scene in the “schlock’’, pseudo-feminist movie, Journey Among Women, which her mother co-wrote. Tabloid newspaper the Sunday Mirror reported the scandal, revealing how Rozanna had become so drunk while filming a scene involving alcohol, “she collapsed in a stupor.’’ Her father, author Merv Lilley, “threatened to withdraw her from the movie.’’ Rozanna told the newspaper “going naked didn’t worry me.’’ Today, she sees that role - which included a “ridiculous” lesbian affair with an adult - as exploitative. She says of her mother’s involvement: “She had a lot of fantasies about herself that she enacted through her daughters.’’

Photographer Juno Gemes, who was a friend of Hewett, insisted that she was “a glorious feminist.’’ She wanted her daughters to have access to the highest echelons of the literary world. “I am really shocked that they’re casting their mother like this … I think she would be devastated by these allegations,” Gemes said. Rozanna, who has told her story to a closed session of the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, said her mother “genuinely believed she was offering this unfettered, uninhibited lifestyle to us.’’ Kate said her early sexual experiences had been “a source of tremendous distress and pain’’ that continued for decades.

Dorothy Hewitt, Kate and Rozanna Lilley, circa 1975.

* 9 June 2018, The Weekend Australian - Review, Rosemary Neill. Interview with Kate and Rozanna Lilley.

A Family Affair

Growing up in a licentious household in the free-and-easy 1970s had devastating consequences for Dorothy Hewett's children, writes Rosemary Neill.

It's easy enough to see why people might have envied the Lilley girls. Rozanna and Kate, daughters of celebrated playwright Dorothy Hewett and merchant seaman turned author Merv Lilley, spent their adolescence and early teenage years at the heart of the 1970s bohemian arts scene – meeting the famous and feted at parties, rehearsals and film shoots; winning roles in high-profile films or radio plays with which their mother or her associates were involved. Swaggering, starry identities - among them Brett Whiteley, Patrick White, Martin Sharp, Bob Ellis and British photographer David Hamilton - passed through the girls' lives; many illustrious names from the theatre, film, literary and visual art worlds were frequent visitors to the family terrace in Woollahra in Sydney's east.

Rozanna, now a 55-year-old anthropologist, author and autism researcher, characterises the Lilley family's home as a "party house". Her older sister Kate, 57, a poet and associate professor of English at the University of Sydney, is far more blunt. "It was just - as an acquaintance says - like a brothel without payment." Four decades on, these daughters of true believers say they were casualties of a predatory sexual code within the 70s libertarian arts culture that saw underage and teenage girls as "fair game". "People liked having us at a party. We were these nubile girls; we were interesting jailbait objects," says Kate, who claims she was sexually assaulted by a film producer at 15 and raped by a visiting poet several months later.

While the #MeToo movement has unearthed many grave allegations of sexual misconduct within the arts and entertainment business in recent months, the Lilley sisters' story has an unsettling twist. Both agree it was their mother, a revered feminist and left wing radical, who encouraged their early sexualisation. Indeed, Kate maintains the abuse she and her younger sister endured was "facilitated" by Hewett, while Rozanna recalls how "my mum partly built her profile on these stories of being outrageous. People referred to her sometimes as being a female Don Juan. We were brought up thinking that was something to emulate; it was something to be. I would say she basically encouraged that ... Mum had a strong belief that sex was good and she saw herself as having been constrained by Victorian parents. I think she genuinely believed she was offering this unfettered, uninhibited lifestyle to us."

Hewett was an ex-communist who had six children to three men. A highly regarded poet, novelist and author of plays including The Chapel Perilous and This Old Man Came Rolling Home, she had talent to burn, a rough charisma and she equated sex - even underage sex - with freedom. She died in 2002, and Rozanna recalls her mother reclining regally at home on a gold velvet sofa, beret atop her waterfall of white blonde hair, smoking a diamante-encrusted pipe, holding court. In her later years she was driven around town in a hearse by the mercurial Merv Lilley, whose widely admired book, Gatton Man, maintained that his father had been a serial killer. He too had many affairs while married to Hewett. The girls initially bought in to their mother's view that sex was in itself a form of liberation. Rozanna recalls that as she and her sister slept with men twice their age, "we felt we were special people doing special things."

By the time the girls turned 16, the legal age of consent, Kate had slept with six men and Rozanna with "at least a dozen." Virtually all of them were older artists and allegedly included now-deceased figures, including writer and film director Ellis and painter Sharp. Photographer Hamilton took pornographic images of Rozanna, she says, when she was "14 or 15" and met him for what she thought would be a modelling session. "It was unbearable at home," says Kate, whose calm, measured way of speaking forms a striking contrast to the disturbing events she describes. "There were constantly men staying in the house and hardly any man came to the house who didn't try to have sex with one or more of us (Kate, Rozanna or her mother). "I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie, and then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie. I think because Mum was this figure of sexual licence, we were particular targets." She adds that when gay men from the theatre scene were around, the house felt safer. Parties where the girls were left to their own devices weren't safe, either. Kate says that, when she was 15, she went to a party where a film producer pushed her into a toilet and masturbated against her body. Several months later, she says, she was raped in the family home when her parents were away, by a poet from interstate. "There were very few instances in which I said no (to men who wanted sex). We were not brought up to say 'no'," she reveals. She refused the poet's advances, "but he was not in the slightest bit interested in that, so I just gave in. I was 15 then and told Mum about that. She didn't believe me. She said she asked him, and he said that I had consented."

According to Kate, the poet who allegedly sexually assaulted her went on to have an affair with her mother. He was not only the man who slept with her and Hewett. "We were very explicitly encouraged, even enjoined by Mum to think, like her, that sexual attention was the be-all and end-all of everything," says Kate. Echoing her older sister, Rozanna says their mother "would often say that the greatest thing in life was sex. So you sort of became quite keen to get involved because that is what she encouraged us to do."

For decades, the sisters refrained from discussing their experiences of exploitation and abuse with each other or their parents. Rozanna says that, in the 1980s, her mother once demanded: "What's all this shit about me being a bad mother?" She adds drily: "Mum tended to go on the offensive." In an extraordinary coincidence of timing, both women have launched books this month that address their traumatising experiences of sexual abuse in the self-consciously bohemian 70s arts milieu. Kate's new book, Tilt, is an elegant poetry collection that references her troubled teenage years, as well as the 70s green bans, Greta Garbo and organised crime. Rozanna's book, Do Oysters Get Bored?, is a "hybrid" account of her "carelessly broken girlhood" and a wry, tender exploration of her later life as a committed parent to her autistic son; Oscar. Both books include emotionally stark poems that describe specific incidents of abuse the sisters endured as schoolgirls. Those experiences range from rape and molestation to consensual sex (including underage sex) with older men. None of the perpetrators are named. However, in candid interviews with Review, Rozanna and Kate reveal how they were sexually abused or exploited by Sharp, Ellis, Hamilton and several other men who are still practising artists.

Rozanna says she had sex once with Sharp, Australia's leading pop artist, when she was 15. "I had a terrible crush on him," she recalls, but he didn't reciprocate her feelings. Decades later, he phoned her to apologise. "You are the only one who has ever said sorry," she writes in Mickey Mouse Romance, a poem about her underage encounter with the painter, who was 20 years her senior.

When she was "14 or 15", she went to a Sydney hotel to meet visiting photographer Hamilton. Rather than taking anticipated modelling shots, Hamilton "photographed me topless and then he took photographs of my vagina. Close-ups." She submitted to this after the internationally famous photographer showed her his child porn collection, "so that I would see other girls agreed to do this." She adds, as an afterthought: "Honestly, I was not paid a cent, just to add insult to injury." Hamilton, known for his images of naked pubescent girls, committed suicide in 2016 following child rape allegations.

Both sisters allege they had underage sexual encounters - one was an alleged indecent assault - with Ellis. Kate claims she had sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16 and still living at home. There was no coercion, 'just an understanding that he wanted to have sex with me and I just did ... whenever he turned up, he'd have sex with me. I didn't at the time think that was some big, terrible thing ... I was reasonably neutral about it. I didn't hate him." She recalls one of those encounters in a new poem, Chattel, while in her book Rozanna writes of how Ellis allegedly forced her "reluctant fingers" inside his "verbose Y-fronts". That poem is called Come Here, Child. Rozanna says Ellis was simultaneously a friend and supporter: he tried to secure her film work and hired her as a school holiday nanny, thus adding to her confusion about the art scene's sexual ethics.

Kate reveals she has been through 20 years of therapy, partly because of the depression and anxiety that runs in her family, and partly because of her teenage experiences. She has written about the latter obliquely in earlier poetry collections, but the revelations of the #MeToo movement convinced her "this is a moment to risk something more explicit". She says the past sexual violations she was subjected to form "a strong presence in the book, not sexual abuse only but a culture of sexual predation and objectification". One poem, Party Favour, ends with the devastating memory of telling her mother about the rape she allegedly endured at 15, and realising "she's not on my side."

In her essays, Rozanna writes of her adolescence with more of a sense of regret than anger; her poems reveal more of her "hurt self'. She also told her story to the Royal Commission into Child Abuse, in a closed session that focused on the entertainment industry. She was just 13 when she was cast in a colonial-era film, Journey Among Women, about convict women who escape from their abusive guards and attempt to create a feral, women only bush colony, complete with gratuitous nudity and lesbian romance. Rozanna had her first period while on the set, yet she appears topless and naked in this "schlock" film and has "a lesbian affair with a judge's daughter, which is ridiculous ... My first experience of faux intercourse was having an actor on top of me, pretending to rape me in that film. I looked back on that and I thought: 'How extraordinary to put a young girl through that.'" The schoolgirl's on-screen nudity attracted media attention and she ended up on the front page of a tabloid when Journey Among Women was released in 1977. Her father once rescued her from the set when she became nauseous and drunk from consuming alcohol used in one scene. She notes that "perhaps the really disturbing part is that my mother wrote the script, or sections of the script. She had a lot of fantasies about herself that she enacted through her daughters - and that would be a prime example." The film is still being sold on DVD. Before they left school, both girls were cast in small roles in the classic film The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Aged 15 and 17, and unbeknown to each other, they both slept with the same senior crew member.

This is a complex and painful story, in which the women's evident love for their parents collides with their ambivalence about how they failed to protect them from predators. Kate says that for all her mother's flaws, "we loved each other hugely". She edited the book Selected Poems of Dorothy Hewett in 2010. Though her father was "a very difficult man", Rozanna maintained a "huge well of affection" for Merv Lilley and helped look after him before he died in 2016. "They were both very damaged," says Kate. "Dad made efforts to try to protect us but he was very mad … I assume he was bipolar; he was also violent." Rozanna says her father "was busily running around chasing women and generally carrying on, often in a rather more aggressive way than my mother was." Yet one of her poems, Soap Opera, tells how she once found her mother at home in bed with a strange man. Later that night, she saw her father washing the dishes and weeping.

Both Lilley daughters attempted to escape the tumult and chaos of their parents' home by moving in with older men. Kate says she started living with a now eminent artist when she was 16. He was in his 30s and had a serious drinking problem. (The artist claims she was 17 at the time.) He adds that Hewett, with whom he later formed "a really intense, creative relationship of the mind", paid the bond on his and Kate's rented apartment. Soon after this, Kate started a relationship with a female teacher known for sleeping with her students. The girls eventually found stability by turning away from the aggressively alternative arts world for which they had been so assiduously groomed, and embracing academe. Kate pursued postgraduate studies at London and Oxford universities before joining the University of Sydney, while Rozanna has two PhDs and is an autism researcher attached to Macquarie University. Both are in long-term relationships and Rozanna says, touchingly, that she is "terribly proud" of this, as "it was difficult for us to figure out how to do that given the kind of household we grew up in."

Novelist Tom Flood, Kate's and Rozanna's half-brother, says his mother ''believed in children's rights" and that "covered a wide range." While Flood, a Miles Franklin literary award winner, mostly lived in Western Australia in the 70s, "I knew there'd been quite a bit of underage (sexual) stuff involving quite a few people, some of whom are quite respected around town." While his mother "put them (his sisters) into that milieu ... I would sheet home any blame to the men involved. They were the times, and men were taking advantage of it."

Photographer Juno Gemes was a friend of Hewett's and says the playwright was "a glorious feminist". She "wanted her daughters to have access to the highest echelons of the literary world. I am really shocked that they're casting their mother like this ... I think she would be devastated by these allegations."

Energised by a cultural renaissance in local film, theatre and literature, the 70s is perhaps the most romanticised decade in Australian cultural history. Yet the sisters say few people are prepared to acknowledge the sexual exploitation that was part of this world. Kate is not pressing for legal action to be taken against those men who are still alive and who assaulted or had underage sex with her. "I'm very scared of it all," she says. "I've been on antidepressants for 20 years. I've been in therapy for 20 years. I'm in a good place. This has all been a source of tremendous distress and pain. In one sense I feel clear-cut outrage about it and in another sense I feel it was all just a huge mess and very complicated." Rozanna fears a ''backlash" to her book. She has already found that telling her stories to people who knew her parents "will be greeted with silence and people will tum away. Obviously things are changing with the #MeToo movement. But I think people don't want to know, in the main." And then, of course, there is the most disorienting factor of all - their mother's role in the mistreatment of her daughters. "Mum certainly thought she was doing something for us," says Kate. "She had this fantasy of what a free life was, but she had no thought about us being kids."

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* 10 June 2018, New Zealand Herald.

Australian celebrity paedophile ring revealed

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* Sunday 10 June 2018, Sunday Telegraph, Tim Blair.

Bob Ellis and the ‘Underage Brothel Without Payment’

Most people on the left are not entirely disgusting. Some are very nice. And then there are the likes of the late Bob Ellis, Labor speechwriter and total toxic load. Ellis spent most of his life pretending the Labor party was a religion and obtaining honorary citizenship at Liquorland. When even Fairfax and the ABC largely tired of him, Ellis became an online presence specialising in casual lies about conservatives and getting predictions wrong, all the while cultivating a persona so putrid it could be detected by scent. Still, Bob’s fans stuck by him right until and beyond the end. Aren’t all babies born with Ellis’s talents? Infants have little trouble howling incoherently, soiling themselves, vomiting and desperately seeking constant liquid refreshment. But at least they don’t, by virtue of their age, sexually assault anybody. Unlike Ellis, according to Rosemary Neill’s extraordinary interview with the daughters of leftist cultural icons Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley:

Swaggering, starry identities - among them Brett Whiteley, Patrick White, Martin Sharp, Bob Ellis and British photographer David Hamilton - passed through the girls’ lives; many illustrious names from the theatre, film, literary and visual art worlds were frequent visitors to the family terrace in Woollahra in Sydney’s east. Rozanna, now a 55-year-old anthropologist, author and autism researcher, characterises the Lilley family’s home as a “party house”. Her older sister Kate, 57, a poet and associate professor of English at the University of Sydney, is far more blunt. “It was just - as an acquaintance says - like a brothel without payment.”

“People liked having us at a party. We were these nubile girls, we were interesting jailbait objects,” says Kate, who claims she was sexually assaulted by a film producer at 15 and raped by a visiting poet several months later. While the #MeToo movement has ¬unearthed many grave allegations of sexual misconduct within the arts and entertainment business in recent months, the Lilley sisters’ story has an unsettling twist: both agree it was their mother, a revered feminist and left-wing radical, who encouraged their early sexualisation.

Don’t bother searching Twitter for #Metoo condemnations of Ellis or Hewett, by the way. There aren’t many. Although this is interesting. Back to Neill's article:

By the time the girls turned 16, the legal age of consent, Kate had slept with six men and -Rozanna with “at least a dozen”. Virtually all of them were older artists and allegedly included now-deceased figures, including writer and film director Ellis and painter Sharp … Both sisters allege they had underage sexual encounters — one was an alleged indecent ¬assault — with Ellis. Kate claims she had sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16 and still living at home. There was no coercion, “just an understanding that he wanted to have sex with me and I just did … whenever he turned up, he’d have sex with me. I didn’t at the time think that was some big, terrible thing … I was reasonably neutral about it. I didn’t hate him.”

Interestingly, in 2011 Ellis wrote a piece for the ABC’s now-defunct Drum website, then edited by wayward #Metoo advocate Jonathan Green, in which he defended creative types who were accused of paedophilia. Ellis named several historical figures, including Shakespeare, who he thought might be paedophiles, and said it would have been a shame if their desire to have sex with children had eventually stopped them from working. He named other men accused of sexual harassment, including filmmaker Roman Polanski (who was accused of child rape), saying the "tactic" of having women accuse them of assault in order to silence them "works very well". If only it had worked on Ellis.

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* Sunday 10 June 2018, Daily Mail / The Queensland Times, Candace Sutton.

Australian celebrity paedophile ring revealed

Stunning revelations of an Australian paedophile ring involving celebrity arts figures have been laid bare by the daughters of a prominent playwright. Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports. Sharp, Australia's foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton's band, Cream. Ellis was a political commentator, write and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays. The Lilley sisters, who each have written new books, say their mother encouraged underage sex between her daughters and famous men she entertained at her Sydney house. The sisters say the men enjoyed having young girls around and their mother, considered a left wing radical and admired feminist, encouraged their joining in the libertine sex scene of the times. "We were these nubile girls … jailbait," Kate Lilley said, describing her mother's house as "a brothel without payment". Other men included a local film producer who is still alive and a poet who raped Kate Lilley when she was underage, plus renowned British erotic photographer, David Hamilton. Known for his soft-lit images of prepubescent young girls, 83-year-old Hamilton took his own life in 2016 after a former model accused him of raping her in 1987 when she was 13 years old. In the Woollahra terrace Hewett shared with her husband, writer Merv Lilley, a queue of famous men attended parties in the salon-like atmosphere where the sisters spent their early teens. Sex was facilitated by Hewett who also slept with some of the men, while her husband had sex with other women. When she turned 16 years old, Kate Lilley had already slept with six men and her younger sister Rozanna had slept with a dozen men by the time she reached the age of consent. The men were older artists and writers, including Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, and Hamilton who photographed pornographic images of Rozanna. Rozanna said she had sex once, when she was 15, with Martin Sharp, who decades later apologised to her. David Hamilton took close photographs of her genitals after showing her pornographic images of girls to prove others had consented. "It was unbearable at home," Kate Lilley said, "I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie. "But then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie." Kate Lilley's teenage years are referred to in poems in her new book, Tilt, which the 57-year-old pet and university English professor has published. Rozanna, 55, an anthropologist and autism researcher also writes poems about sexual abuse by (unnamed) older men in her book, Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life. Kate Lilley told The Australian she had sex four times with Bob Ellis when she was aged 15 and 16, "whenever he turned up". Rozanna has written a poem about her sexual encounter with Ellis as a child. At the age of 13, Rozanna Lilley was cast in the lesbian-themed film Journey Among Women about female convicts living in the bush. Her mother, Dorothy Hewett, wrote the script. The film is still available on DVD.

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* Monday, 11 June 2018, Sydney Morning Herald, Broede Carmody.

Dorothy Hewitt's daughters say grown men preyed on them as children

The daughters of late poet Dorothy Hewett want to lift the lid on the "bohemian middle class" of 1970s Australia. It was a time, they say, when male artists – including famous playwrights and photographers – preyed on young girls. It took years for Hewett's daughter Kate Lilley, a poet, to fully comprehend what happened when she was still legally a child - and many more to speak out about it. The English professor says she was raped at the age of 15 by a well-known Australian poet who is still alive. She says a film producer sexually assaulted her during a drug- and alcohol-fuelled party several months earlier. Her sister, writer and autism researcher Rozanna Lilley, also experienced sexual assault. She names the late playwright and former Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis – who died of liver cancer in 2016 – as one of the perpetrators. But the sisters say these are not new revelations, despite having sent shockwaves through the Australian literary community. The women say the behaviour was anything but a secret. For example, in Hewett's poem In this romantic house each storey's peeled, the literary icon writes:

Each storey's peeled / for rapists randy poets & their lovers / young men in jeans play out seductive ballets / partner my naked girls.

"This is not some out-of-the-blue attack on our mother," Kate said. "People have acted like this is big news but [mum] wrote about this constantly. It was all openly discussed with her." Her younger sister Rozanna agrees. "I have been telling parts of this story for some time," she said. "The #MeToo movement didn't exist. I [also] told my story at the Royal Commission into Child Abuse for a session on the entertainment industry. We were brought up in a very bohemian environment and some of those experiences were worse than others. Mum really didn't believe in not exposing us to anything. We grew up very fast, very hard in that environment. But there was no paedophile ring. It was just part of that time."

Both women have recently published new books that explore their childhood traumas. Kate has released a collection of poetry through Vagabond Press called Tilt, while Rozanna has published a book of poems and essays through UWA Press called Do Oysters Get Bored? The hybrid work also explores parenting her son, who lives with autism. Kate said she wanted to stress that the incidents that occurred in her childhood weren't just restricted to the Sydney arts scene. Instead, she said it was part of a larger cultural problem at the time. "In many ways, it was a very ordinary story," she said. "It was very prevalent. A lot of women have reached out saying they grew up in a celebrity milieu and 'we too'."

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* Monday, 11 June 2018, news.com.au. Candice Sutton.

Australian arts luminaries used girls for sex: report

Predatory sexual behaviour in Australia’s arts community included literary figures and famous artists for whom prepubescent sisters were “jailbait”. Stunning revelations of predatory sexual behaviour involving celebrity arts figures have been laid bare by the daughters of a prominent playwright. Rozanna and Kate Lilley, the daughters of playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett, say they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late Bob Ellis and Martin Sharp, The Australian reports. Sharp, Australia’s foremost pop artist, designed record covers and posters for Bob Dylan, Donovan and Eric Clapton and wrote songs for Clapton’s band, Cream. Ellis was a political commentator, writer and film maker who penned 22 television and screenplays. The Lilley sisters, who each have written new books, say their mother encouraged underage sex between her daughters and famous men she entertained at her Sydney home, which Rozanna characterised as a “party house”. The sisters say the men enjoyed having young girls around and their mother - considered a left wing radical and admired feminist - encouraged their joining in the libertine sex scene of the times. “We were these nubile girls … jailbait,” Kate Lilley said, describing her mother’s house as “a brothel without payment”. Dorothy Hewett’s Sydney house was like an ‘unpaid brothel’ for the underage sisters who were ‘jailbait’ for prominent arts figures. Other men included a local film producer who is still alive and a poet who raped Kate Lilley when she was underage, plus renowned British erotic photographer, David Hamilton. Known for his soft-lit images of prepubescent young girls, 83-year-old Hamilton took his own life in 2016 after a former model accused him of raping her in 1987 when she was 13 years old. In the Woollahra terrace Hewett shared with her husband, writer Merv Lilley, a queue of famous men attended parties in the salon-like atmosphere where the sisters spent their early teens. Sex was facilitated by Hewett who also slept with some of the men, while her husband had sex with other women. When she turned 16 years old, Kate Lilley had already slept with six men and her younger sister Rozanna had slept with a dozen men by the time she reached the age of consent. Rozanna said she had sex once, when she was 15, with Martin Sharp, who decades later apologised to her.

David Hamilton took close photographs of her genitals after showing her pornographic images of girls to prove others had consented. “It was unbearable at home,” Kate Lilley said, “I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie. “But then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie.” Kate Lilley’s teenage years are referred to in poems in her new book, Tilt, which the 57-year-old poet and university English professor has published. Rozanna, 55, an anthropologist and autism researcher also writes poems about sexual abuse by (unnamed) older men in her book, Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life. Kate Lilley told The Australian she had sex four times with Ellis when she was aged 15 and 16, “whenever he turned up”. Rozanna has written a poem about her sexual encounter with Ellis as a child. At the age of 13, Rozanna was cast in the lesbian-themed film Journey Among Women about female convicts living in the bush. Her mother wrote the script. The film is still available on DVD.

Tilt by Kate Lilley is published by Vagabond Press, $24.95; Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life by Rozanna Lilley, by UWA Publishing, $29.99.

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Dorothy Hewitt. Source: The Courier Mail.

* Monday, 11 June 2018. Courier Mail, Brisbane, Matthew Condon.

Opinion: Paedophiles’ ‘different time’ excuse doesn’t wash.

Horrendous allegations that one of the nation’s most famous literary figures encouraged her young daughters to have underage sex with prominent men are being played down by some. But child sexual abuse is precisely that – child abuse – no matter what era or in what context.

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* Tuesday, 12 June 2018, My Poetic Side blog, Joanne Jeffries.

Poets Daughters Admit They Were Preyed on as Children

A somewhat disturbing story has broken into the news in Australia in the last couple of days involving the daughters of the late poet Dorothy Hewett. Both women claim that during their childhood, growing up in the 1970s there were many visitors to their home, men who preyed on young girls and that both were sexually assaulted and raped whilst in their mid-teens. Whilst these declarations have sent something of a shockwave through the literary community they claim there are allusions to these incidents in their mother’s poetry. Kate and Rozanna Lilley, who are both also poets have recently published books that explore the traumas they struggled with during their childhood. They neither of them blame their mother for what happened and feel it was very much a cultural issue that was prevalent at the time. In fact, many women have come forward since their revelations to tell them they are not alone.

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* Tuesday, 12 June 2018, The Australian, Rosemary Neill.

Hewett’s publisher had ‘bad feeling about atmosphere in poet’s home’

Dorothy Hewett’s former publisher Katharine Brisbane says she “had a bad feeling” about the playwright’s Sydney home where Hewett’s daughters were allegedly abused or exploited by older men from the 1970s arts world. The publisher also said she was so frightened of the playwright’s second husband, Merv Lilley, “I didn’t like to be alone with him in a room’’. Brisbane, who set up drama publisher Currency Press with her husband, Philip Parsons, in the 70s, lived in the same street in ¬Sydney’s east as the Hewett-¬Lilley family.

“I was always scared of Merv,’’ she said yesterday. “If you were walking down the front passage into the house, he had a way of leaning on you and pressing you into the wall.’’ She also said, “there was a free, sexual atmosphere in the home, but I didn’t understand the damage this caused’’. Brisbane was responding to ¬allegations by Hewett and Lilley’s adult daughters, Kate and Rozanna Lilley, that their mother ¬“facilitated” and “encouraged” them to have underage sex with predatory, older men from the 70s arts scene.

Elder daughter Kate, 57, a Sydney University academic and author, said during the 70s, the family’s home was “unbearable’’ and “as an acquaintance says, like a brothel without payment’’. The daughters said deceased artists Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and British photographer David Hamilton had sexually abused or exploited one or both of them ¬before they had turned 16. Kate said she had been raped by a poet, who is still alive, when she was 15. He allegedly later slept with her mother and younger sister.

Brisbane, a former theatre critic for this newspaper, recalled neighbourhood rumours about the Hewett daughters being sexually precocious: “I didn’t see any ¬evidence of it myself. The men coming to the house were certainly noticed (by neighbours) … I understood this was going on, through hearsay, but I am certainly shocked by the extent of it as depicted in The Australian.’’ Still, she said, likening the family’s home to a brothel was “very strong’’.

Hewett’s oldest surviving son, Joe Flood, yesterday defended his mother as a “nice’’ and “kind” woman who was “amazingly supportive” throughout his life. He said she once intervened and saved a young woman he knew from being sexually abused by a close relative. Mr Flood, a housing industry consultant, said he and his two brothers — born before Hewett met Lilley — grew up in a “totally different environment” to his sisters’ bohemian ¬milieu. “We couldn’t do anything,” — even television was off limits, he said. In contrast, “my sisters were extremely precocious. To claim they had no agency is ridiculous. They were like much older women.’’ He said responsibility for the abuse of his sisters lay with the men who took advantage of them, and with Lilley, rather than with Hewett. He said the view their mother was the “prime mover” within the family was wrong. “Of course she had limited agency,’’ he said. By the time the girls reached adolescence, he had moved out of the family home. Expanding on a letter published in The Australian yesterday, he said while visiting his family he intervened several times when his sisters were being sexually exploited by older men. He argued that Lilley should have prevented such exploitation.

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* Tuesday, 12 June 2018, Daily Telegraph, Miranda Devine.

The 1970s really was the Devil’s decade.

The ghastly abuse of the daughters of feminist poet Dorothy Hewitt is the end result of the neo-Marxism which infested Australian academia in the ‘60s and ‘70s, writes Miranda Devine.

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* Wednesday, 13 June 2018, The Guardian, Brigid Delany.

Bob Ellis: what do you do when a literary hero is accused of sexual abuse?

Those seeking to cure themselves of the romanticism about the free love era should read Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal and the two books just out this week by the daughters of Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett: Tilt by Kate Lilley and Do Oysters Get Bored? by Rozanna Lilley. Last weekend, speaking to the Australian, sisters Rozanna and Kate Lilley talked about how their Sydney bohemian childhood was marked by “wild parties” and lack of “moral boundaries” which resulted in the teenage girls being sexually abused by a variety of famous male house guests.

“It was unbearable at home,” Kate Lilley told the Australian. “I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie, and then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie.” She also described her childhood home as “a brothel without payment”. The sisters named Australian cultural icons Martin Sharp, Bob Ellis and photographer David Hamilton as men that abused or exploited them. All three are dead.

But first to Roth – who died last month. The Dying Animal is not considered one of his greatest works – in fact Vulture listed it recently as “for fans only”. But reading the novella for the first time last week, it stood out as one of the most depressing and realistic portrayals of an aging leech. For all the accusations of Roth’s misogyny, his hideous man here – the recurring character of Professor David Kepesh – is not glorified. He’s brought to his knees by crushing on a student almost four decades his junior, and felled also by jealousy, fears of ageing, disease and death. The book is a disavowal of the sexual revolution and the unhappiness caused by a constant churn of sexual partners. Kepesh abandons his family for free love and sex with his students, and finds himself despised by his son. Decades later, his son eventually leaves his own wife and children. Here, the desire for new partners and new experiences is a source of torment and misery, not enlightenment and freedom. The son Kenny says with scorn: “[T]he sixties? That explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression, and that explains everything and excuses it all?”

Do the 60s (and 1970s) really “excuse it all”? One of the many things the #MeToo movement has forced many of us to consider is whether the sexual revolution really was a revolution for all or just for some men. The casualties of the free love generation are emerging as part of the #MeToo movement. Kate Lilley calls it the “we too generation” – and in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, says the incidents from her childhood weren’t restricted to the Sydney arts scene but were part of a larger cultural problem at the time. “In many ways, it was a very ordinary story,” she says. “It was very prevalent. A lot of women have reached out saying they grew up in a celebrity milieu and ‘we too’.”’ Kate and Rozanna Lilley have been in therapy for years. The experience with these men was not characterised by the “free love” of the era. It was traumatic, not liberating. This brings us to Ellis – former Labor speechwriter who died of liver cancer in 2016 – and one of the men the sisters say abused them at parties. I single Ellis out because I knew him in his later years. I adored much of his writing – and from afar, his life seemed glamorous. Via mutual friends, I sought him out, and tried to make him a mentor. But finding out your literary hero is not only a grub (that was apparent after he wrote a vile piece published in the Drum about the so-called ADF Skype scandal in 2011, since removed from the internet) but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work. I’ve spoken this week to half a dozen people who knew Ellis (although not during the era Hewett’s parties took place – their friendship with him was more recent) and one or two are of the opinion “judge the times, not the person”. The rest of us are taking our weighty copies of Goodbye Jerusalem off the shelf and hurling them across the room.

Other women I’ve spoken to this week have had bruising and horrible encounters with Ellis – of the verbal, not the physical kind. They’ve left dinner tables angry and humiliated about how he talked about women. Their anger is not just with him but the literary and political communities that knew of his behaviour towards woman and accepted it (the Lilley sisters describe Ellis’s behaviour as an “open secret”). Powerful individuals and organisations continued to give him work, which then contributed to strengthen his “brand” and his cultural power, which then, in a feedback loop, contributed to his allure for younger writers. For a younger generation coming in after the baby boomers, Ellis became a bit of an elder statesman around the early 2000 mark. He crossed genres with an ease that many of us trying to get a foothold into creative careers envied and wished to emulate: politics, the movies, journalism, playwriting. He did it all. Marieke Hardy even named her dog after him. As for me, when I wrote my first book I spent a pleasant dinner at the man’s elbow. As he talked about writing, I scribbled notes in my diary, his words falling like money that I tried to grab and pocket. He spoke like he wrote, in a sort of hypnotic and lyrical cadence that sometimes ended with a mumbled “and so it goes”. The uncomfortable question for me is this: does trading off Ellis’s cultural cachet and wisdom and turning a blind eye to the occasional misogynist rant and ugly rumours become a form of oppression of victim’s voices and a sort of collusion with the aggressor? After reading the Lilley sisters accounts of sexual abuse, the answer can only be “yes.”

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* Thursday, 14 June 2018, Stephen McAlpine Blog.

When The Bodies Start Washing Up On The Shore

It’s been my contention that the bodies of the Sexual Revolution tsunami will eventually start to wash up on the shore. It’s also been my contention that the church has to be prepared for that time; to put behind it its sin of falling under the spell of that cultural narrative, admitting it has been complicit in it, and first living, then telling a better story. The liberal arm of the church decided the future lay in accepting the Sexual Revolution – only at half speed. Many within the evangelical arm of the church decried the sexual revolution, only to practice it “in-camera”, but is now being exposed by camera for its hypocrisy. It’s always a good time to repent. But no time like the present, for the bodies are starting to wash up on the shore. Thick and fast. This came home to me reading the harrowing account of two of the children of one of the revolution’s sexual heroes, the Australian playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett in the Weekend Australian newspaper.

In my university days Hewett was lauded as pinnacle of the new age, the sexually free age in which the old repressed ways were being laundered out of our culture, and the utopian dreams of the sexual sixties and early seventies were being realised. Only those dreams are now becoming a nightmare. Hewett’s daughters, Rozanna and Kate, have revealed that the sexual liberty of their household was a sexual dungeon in which adult men repeatedly forced both girls into sex, often at their mother’s tacit approval, and more tragically, as a way to further her own interests and image as a new age libertine. What’s more galling is how many of those men were the heroes of the progressive narrative in Australia over the past forty years, including the late writer and film director Bob Ellis, whose every utterance and written word was viewed as gospel by the sexular Left, and who was also a speech writer for ALP luminaries. The searing concern, however, is that the girls thought these sexual encounters were the new normal, the way things were to be. At least they did back then when it was happening, as Kate says in the article, there was no coercion:

“…just an understanding that he wanted to have sex with me and I just did…whenever he turned up, he’d have sex with me. I didn’t at the time think that some big terrible thing…I was reasonably neutral about it. I didn’t hate him.”

Rozanna recalls it like this as she and her sister slept with men twice their age:

“We felt we were special people doing special things.”

Special things like realising Mummy’s dream of a sexual utopia. Well that’s alright then. Except of course it wasn’t. And for both of the girls, the dream has turned into a nightmare. Both women, now in later middle age, have been living the life of anti-depressants, therapy for decades, and a fear of the backlash of telling the stories which indict the literati and pop cultural icons of our fair land. When Ellis died everyone lined up to laud him, from former Prime Ministers to journalists, artists and other bastions of our arts scene. But with the bodies washing up on the shore, those days of hagiography are over. The interesting thing is, however, those who decry the sexual revolution can carry on all they like about the body count, it’s only when the revolution’s former advocates and children line up to put the boot in that anyone sits up and takes notice. Hence we get this in The Guardian:

Delaney states:

finding out your literary hero is not only a grub, but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work.

Yes I imagine it must. But not for all:

I’ve spoken this week to half a dozen people who knew Ellis (although not during the era Hewett’s parties took place – their friendship with him was more recent) and one or two are of the opinion “judge the times, not the person”. The rest of us are taking our weighty copies of Goodbye Jerusalem off the shelf and hurling them across the room.

In other words, the secular church is at as much pains to protect its sainted ones as the actual church has disgracefully, been. Of course this all happened forty years ago. So let’s judge the times, and not the person, as per the request. Mind you I suspect even in those times, and among that cohort, there were plenty of poets, rock stars and playwrights who could keep their penis in their pants when around an underage girl. But let’s talk about the times anyway. The times promised that the old age of sexual suppression was over. The times promised that marriage the way it was configured was out-dated and to be superseded. The times promised that the new humanity would embrace this new sexuality. The times promised that the new sexuality would produce the joy and freedom that Roz Ward of the Safe Schools Coalition says that she is fighting for. And the times said, even for Kate and Rozanna, as they were being sexually abused, that this was the new normal, and that the rest of the culture would follow that pathway eventually. Yet here we are, with the bodies washing up on the shore. Not today’s bodies. Not yesterday’s. Not even the bodies from ten years ago. The bodies from forty years ago. The bodies that were supposed to be the golden children of a new generation. Forty years from now the bodies of the current claims by this latest iteration of the Sexual Revolution will start to wash up on the show. Many a person, many an institution, including – sadly – many a church, is pronouncing this iteration, this expression, as the one that will finally break the shackles of the old sexual world and release us into utopia. That is a triumph of hope over experience. The bodies will continue to be washed up on the shore. I hope the church has repented, re-established itself, and put the stain of its own sexual sin and complicity behind it, ready to receive and care for those bodies, and offer them A Better Story than the one I just read in The Weekend Australian.

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* 14 June 2018, University of Western Australia. Continuation of the Dorothy Hewitt Award.

Dorothy Hewett and the Dorothy Hewett Award

UWA Publishing created the Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript in the face of severe cuts to the standing of Western Australian writers when the government put on hold in 2015 the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. We selected Dorothy Hewett as an outstanding writer who was born in this place and spent decades here as a writer, a university teacher, and a mentor to many. We stand by our decision to select a distinguished and internationally recognised writer of plays, fiction and poetry for an award about to be offered for the fourth time. It has attracted a good deal of prestige already with writers and readers.

The stories told recently by Dorothy Hewett’s two daughters, both of them also authors with UWA Publishing, are shocking and challenge ideas about the duty of parents and other responsible adults to protect children from harm. We express solidarity and love to these adult women for the courage of telling their painful stories in public. But we do not see this as a trigger to change the name of our Award. To conflate these two issues is to misunderstand why we selected Dorothy Hewett in the first place, to honour her profile and achievements as a writer with a strong connection to place and landscape in this part of Australia. As well, she was a writer with a rebellious nature who animated characters and figures from the past and her present on stage and on the page in her extensive output. We honour her work in the history of Australian literature and artistic expression and remain firm in this commitment. If the family were to instruct us to change our position we would do so, but this is not the intention of Dorothy’s daughters to the ongoing legacy of her writing.

Terri-ann White

Director, UWA Publishing.

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* Friday, 15 June 2018, The Spectator, Mark Powell.

Dorothy Hewett: even libertines need limits

Dorothy Hewett is the perfect illustration of what happens when feminism turns feral. The Sydney Morning Herald has said that Ian Syson, editor of the left-wing literary magazine Overland, described Hewett as “Australia’s finest living writer as a playwright and a novelist”. But according to her daughters, Rozanna and Kate, Hewett was more like a modern-day female incarnation approximating Marquis de Sade, the infamous French nobleman, revolutionary politician, philosopher, writer, and sexual libertine. Hewett was a darling of the Left, and was intimately involved with a coterie of libertarian artists, photographers and poets, especially during the 1970s, a period which Miranda Devine aptly describes as ‘the Devil’s Decade’. This was because, according to Devine, Hewett’s feminism meant that:

Sex was a political act. She called herself a feminist but she was brainwashed into a cult which gave men unfettered sex without the family responsibilities civilised society had painstakingly created over eons. Every taboo designed to protect the vulnerable from the predatory sexual instincts of men was torn down.

The Weekend Australian last week reported that Hewett’s daughters described the family home as “like a brothel without payment” and that people often referred to their mother “as being a female Don Juan”. Its piece continued:

These daughters of true believers say they were casualties of a predatory sexual code with the 70s libertarian arts culture that saw underage and teenage girls as “fair game”. “People liked having us at a party. We were these nubile girls, we were interesting jailbait objects,” says Kate, who claims she was sexually assaulted by a film producer at 15 and raped by a visiting poet several months later’.

It’s all eerily similar to the Bohemian practices of the Bloomsbury set, whom Gertrude Himmelfarb describes in her book, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians (Faber and Faber, 1986), as “not only homosexual but androgynous, near-incestuous, and polymorphous promiscuous”. However, the lack of any real public outrage—especially from the likes of David Marr - is truly breathtaking. I mean, just imagine what his response would be if this involved a Catholic priest? As it is, his silence is almost deafening. The only piece The Guardian Australia has published on the issue is by Brigid Delaney. But her rage is reserved exclusively for the former Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis who was one of the main sexual perpetrators named by Hewett’s daughters. Delaney sought our Ellis as a professional mentor, describing how, “As he talked about writing, I scribbled notes in my diary, his words falling like money that I tried to grab and pocket.” What’s more, notice how Delaney subtly minimises the reality of his abuse:

The uncomfortable question for me is this: does trading off Ellis’s cultural cachet and wisdom and turning a blind eye to the occasional misogynist rant and ugly rumours become a form of oppression of victim’s voices and a sort of collusion with the aggressor?

Then there are the comments of photographer Juno Gemes which speaks volumes regarding the double standard that has always existed within the Left, especially when it comes to the connection between feminism and sexual liberation. Gemes described Hewett as ‘a glorious feminist’ who ‘wanted her daughters to have access to the highest echelons of the literary world. I am really shocked that they’re casting their mother like this… I think she would be devastated by these allegations.” What? These are not mere ‘allegations’. They have been reported to the Royal Commission on sexual abuse and they appeared in a major article in The Australian. So, they’re now well-known and established statements of fact which no one has denied or refuted. As the Sydney Morning Herald recently said:

The sisters say these are not new revelations, despite having sent shockwaves through the Australian literary community. The women say the behaviour was anything but a secret. For example, in Hewett’s poem: In this romantic house each storey’s peeled, the literary icon writes: “Each storey’s peeled/for rapists randy poets & their lovers/young men in jeans play out seductive ballets/partner my naked girls.”

Unbelievably, according to Kate, “We were very explicitly encouraged, even enjoined by Mum to think, like her, that sexual attention was the be-all and end-all of everything.” Tragically, her sister Rozanna was subjected to much of the same kind of sexual promiscuity and licentiousness. Rozanna described her upbringing as follows:

We were brought up in a very bohemian environment and some of those experiences were worse than others. Mum really didn’t believe in not exposing us to anything. We grew up very fast, very hard in that environment. But there was no paedophile ring. It was just part of that time.

What is truly extraordinary about these revelations of abuse is that Hewett—guided by her atheistic and radical feminist philosophy—was complicit throughout. According to The Weekend Australian, when Rozanna:

Was just 13 when she was cast in a colonial-era film, Journey Among Women, about convict women who escape from their abusive guards and attempt to create a feral, women-only bush colony, complete with gratuitous nudity and lesbian romance. Rozanna had her first period while on the set, yet she appears topless and naked in this “schlock” film and has “a lesbian affair with a judge’s daughter, which is ridiculous…My first experience of faux intercourse was having an actor on top of me, pretending to rape me in that film. I look back on that and I thought: ‘How extraordinary to put a young girl through that’.

Extraordinary? Or just plain criminal and even wicked? Especially when one considers that the film, Journey Among Women, premiered all the way back in 1977 when homosexual behaviour between consenting adults was still illegal. What’s more, “Her father once rescued her from the set when she became nauseous and drunk from consuming alcohol used in one scene”. But it gets even worse. Rozanna goes on to say:

Perhaps the really disturbing part is that my mother wrote the script, or sections of the script. She had a lot of fantasies about herself that she enacted through her daughters – and that would be a prime example.’ The film is still being sold on DVD.

The real tragedy of this whole sordid affair was that Hewett’s radical feminism—who championed female empowerment through sexual liberation—was integral in orchestrating the abuse of her own children. But that’s what happens when libertines fail to live by any limits.

Mark Powell is the Associate Pastor of Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, Strathfield.

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* Saturday, 16 June 2018, Sydney Morning Herald, Jacqueline Maley.

‘Great men’ used licence to act on grubby impulses

Bob Ellis is still hero-worshipped by many younger Australian writers for his terrific turn of phrase and his irascibility. During his life he was given great artistic licence, but many this week wondered if that licence was too great, following reports he had sex with minors. Kate and Rozanna Lilley, daughters of the late poet Dorothy Hewett, have both published new works describing what went on at their home in the 1970s, revealing a “long list” of male artists who assaulted, exploited or had underage sex with them. The list included Ellis, pop artist Martin Sharp and photographer David Hamilton, all dead. Kate says she had consensual sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16. Rozanna said Ellis “shoved my hands down the front of his trousers” when she was 14. Ellis would have been in his mid-30s at the time. Rozanna now calls it her “carelessly broken girlhood”, a phrase more evocative than any the allegedly brilliant Ellis ever wrote. Kate, a professor and poet, says that what went on at their home was well-known, “a very ordinary story”.

For contemporary Australians, Ellis is probably the most well-known on the list. For journalists and writers of my age and younger, he was a rebel hero, a court jester to the great Labor men of recent history, a self-demolished idealist who churned out brilliant prose. My former colleague (and friend) Brigid Delaney wrote movingly this week about seeking Ellis out as a mentor. But what Ellis actually put on the page was over-shadowed by the life he led off it. Whatever you think of his talent (I am among the heretics who think it’s been over-rated), it was undeniably less than the personal image he cultivated and the cloud of controversy he caused. And controversy over what? Did he push the boundaries on free speech, on the great progressive causes of his time, or in the service of the vulnerable and the voiceless?

Nah. He was famous for defaming a woman who happened to be married to a Liberal politician (Peter Costello’s wife, Tanya) with a fabricated sexual slur which forced a huge defamation payout. There was also a public extra-marital affair, with doubt cast by Ellis over the paternity of the child produced from it. Ellis went on radio to publicly insist he was not the father, in gross detail that showed no respect for any of the individuals involved, not least the blameless baby (remind you of anyone?). DNA testing subsequently proved he was the father. In an earlier 1997 interview with Good Weekend for the “Two of Us” column, Ellis said he and his wife “share a concern for the fate of children, particularly children of divorce”. So he was a hypocrite, too. But as long as he kept up with the brilliant Tony Abbott put-downs, and continued as a great Labor speechwriter, Ellis fans didn’t care that he routinely denigrated women and wrote drivel, such as: “Women, it seems, are tough enough for service on any battlefront but not tough enough to be peeked at in the shower”. That, from a 2011 comment piece on reports of sexual harassment at the Australian Defence Force Academy, was published on the ABC website (since removed), and quoted favourably by Andrew Bolt on his blog.

It is such a candidly stupid remark it’s not even worth calling a “point of view”. And yet Ellis continued to be feted by Labor types (including some politicians) and progressives, all of whom are now silent on reports of their hero’s alleged sex with minors. One wonders if the same would be true if it was one of John Howard’s speechwriters who was so accused, or Tony Abbott’s. Because of the largeness of Ellis’ personality, few remember that his screen-writing work was done in collaboration, and all of his novels were either written in collaboration or based on screenplays. As playwright Louis Nowra wrote in a 2012 book review, “[Ellis’s] literary oeuvre doesn't add up to anything substantial” (Ellis wrote an angry rejoinder to Nowra). Ellis’ speech writing was much praised, but, as with all speech writing, it is not always clear what was written and what was extemporised by the orator. The only people who can really know are the politicians who hired him - Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Nathan Rees and Kim Beazley. One of the only Labor prime ministers with whom he had no association was Julia Gillard. Ellis wrote scathingly about her, in terms grounded in misogyny. He also wrote that Hillary Clinton was frigid and a stranger to oral sex. What a rascal, right?

The truth was that Ellis hated feminists. Loathed them. He dressed up his loathing in libertarian, anti-authoritarian cant about how feminism was totalitarian and retrograde. He said wowser feminism was a “threat to everything”. An egocentric through and through, it seems what he really meant by “everything” was “me”. People talk about the 1970s as though different rules applied, as though it was medieval England, not a decade which the majority of Australians have stored in their recent memory. As though age of consent laws didn’t exist then. As though human decency didn’t exist then. We don’t accept the “those were the times” excuse for the churches, or for the defence forces, so why accept it for the literati, or the so-called Bohemian circles of the '70s, where free love was so often used by men as a tool of exploitation? Creativity and sex have long been linked, as has art with the contravention of bourgeois values. Long may it be so. But too many perverts have taken cover in art for too long. Too many artists have callously used their non-conformity to justify grubby behaviour. These kinds of “great men” were never about artistic freedom. Nothing nearly so romantic. They just wanted a licence to act on their impulses.

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* Saturday 16 June 2018, The Australian, Gerard Henderson.

The Left protects its own regardless of the obscenities

The liberal media has been largely silent concerning the Dorothy Hewett revelations. It's the silence of the comrades and the mates. Rosemary Neill's exclusive story in The Weekend Australian last Saturday that writer Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) had encouraged her underage daughters to have sex with men was quite shocking. But according to my research, the ABC has not covered the story. It has been covered twice in the Sydney Morning Herald, including a piece by Broede Carmody. There was also a brief reference in the Saturday Paper along with a piece in Guardian Australia. Hewett, whose story is well told by Ann-Marie Priest in A Free Flame: Australian Women Writers and Vocation in the Twentieth Century, was a fine novelist, playwright, poet and memoirist. Brought up in a conservative family in Western Australia, she attended university in Perth and became a member of the Communist Party of Australia. Moving between Perth and Sydney, Hewett remained a loyal communist, including during the Soviet Union's invasion of Hungary in 1956. However, she could not abide Moscow's crushing of the Prague Spring when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968. But she remained on the left after dropping her love of European communism. Hewett married a communist lawyer and later lived with a boilermaker in Sydney with whom she had three sons. She married Merv Lilley (1919-2016) with whom she had two daughters, Kate and Rozanna. For most of her adult life, Hewett was a sexual libertarian and a feminist. Kate Lilley (born 1960), a poet and associate professor at the University of Sydney, recently has published a book of poetry titled Tilt. Rozanna Lilley (born 1962), an academic researcher, recently has written Do Oysters Get Bored? A Curious Life. Both women spoke to Neill on the occasion of the release of their books. As girls, the Lilley sisters embraced the sexual liberation preached and practised by their mother. If this had occurred with boys of their own age, this would have been of little moment. But both women maintain that Hewett encouraged them to have sex with older men. Their father must share at least half the blame for this. Kate Lilley says she slept with six men before she reached the legal age of consent at 16. Rozanna puts her figure as "at least a dozen". The former says "there were constantly men staying in the house" in the Sydney suburb of Woollahra and there were "hardly any (heterosexual) men who came to the house who didn't try to have sex with one or more" of Kate, Rozanna or Dorothy. The Lilley sisters have named the deceased male predators, including left-wing hero Bob Ellis (1942-2016), who has had some of his miniseries shown on the ABC and wrote speeches for, among others, Labor politicians Bob Carr, Mike Rann and Bill Shorten. Also named is Martin Sharp (1942-2013), who was a follower of the libertarian Sydney Push and was profiled in the documentary The Sharp Edge, which was shown on the public broadcaster. As Joyce Morgan documents in her biography, Martin Sharp: His Life and Times, Sharp became somewhat conservative in his later years. British photographer David Hamilton (1933-2016), who spent time in Australia in the 1970s, is another named. He took pornographic images of Rozanna Lilley when she was 14 or 15. Hamilton committed suicide in 2016 after being accused of sexual assault. On any analysis, this is a scandalous story involving one of Australia's leading writers (Hewett), her husband (who also became a writer) and two leading figures among the Australian intelligentsia (Ellis and Sharp). Yet the ABC, where many people work who were friends of Ellis and Sharp and admirers of Hewett and Lilley, appears not inclined to mention the issue. This despite the fact Ellis and Sharp were twice the age of the Lilley sisters when they had sex with them. Yet ABC presenters, producers, editors and journalists have been extremely active in chasing down any allegations of historic child sexual abuse said to have been committed by present or former members of the Catholic or Anglican churches. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Carmody says the revelations about Hewett and her daughters has "sent shockwaves through the Australian literary community" but does not comment about why there has been almost no public comment by the intelligentsia. Carmody quotes Kate Lilley as saying she and her sister "were brought up in a very bohemian environment" and that what occurred was "just part of the time". She added: "In many ways it was a very ordinary story. A lot of women have reached out saying they grew up in a celebrity milieu and 'we too'." Carmody reported these views without comment. Yet Fairfax Media would hardly run a story saying that we should not be bothered about sex between men and boys in Catholic institutions since such behaviour was "just part of the time". Among left-of-centre newspapers, Brigid Delaney in the Guardian Australia was the first to focus on the revelations. On Wednesday she commented that "finding out your literary hero is not only a grub ... but had sexually abused underage girls, forces a major reconsideration of the man and his work". For the most part, the left protect their own. Richard Neville (1941-2016), in his 1970 book Play Power, boasted about having sex with an underage schoolgirl in London. Soon after he returned to Australia, Neville was given a program on ABC radio in which he interviewed three pederasts in the ABC studio in Sydney in July 1975. No one reported the child sex abusers to the NSW police. Richard Downing, then ABC chairman, who was appointed by the Whitlam Labor government, rationalised the ABC's decision to air Neville's program. Downing told the Herald at the time that "in general, men will sleep with young boys". Incumbent ABC chairman Justin Milne and his predecessor, Jim Spigelman, have refused to distance the contemporary ABC from Downing's statement, which has never been renounced. Ellis, Sharp and Neville were all besties, in current terminology. Today their memory is protected by their admirers - particularly within the ABC.

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Saturday, 16 June 2018, The Australian, Helen Tinca.

High Cost of Free Love

The headline was, frankly, incredible: “Patricia Hewitt called for age of consent to be lowered to ten”. It was 2014 — almost 40 years after Hewitt, a former British Labour cabinet minister — had been part of a London-based lobby group. Hewitt, the daughter of one of Australia’s best-known public servants, Sir Lenox Hewitt, was forced to apologise when London newspapers revisited the incident. Hewitt had been general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties that supported the Paedophile Information Exchange in the 1970s. In 1976 her name appeared on a press release saying the age of consent should be lowered to 14, with “special provision for situations where the partners are close in age or where the consent of a child over ten can be proved”. In 2014, she said the proposal to lower the age of consent was made by the council, not her, and that she did not support lowering the age. The incident raises many issues but the most startling aspect is that, four decades on, the idea of a mainstream organisation arguing for consensual sexual relations for 10-year-olds is, well, incredible. That it could get a guernsey in the 70s says much about how public debate has shifted: it’s not so much that there was support for sex between consenting children, but that back then such confronting ideas could be voiced. Back then, of course, was when playwright Dorothy Hewett, married to the author Merv Lilley, “facilitated” and “encouraged” their teenage daughters Rozanna and Kate to sleep with a number of much older, predatory men.

The revelations by the Lilley daughters — now women in their 50s — shocked many, including those who knew the parents, when they were published in The Weekend Australian last week. The women said deceased writer Bob Ellis, artist Martin Sharp and British photographer David Hamilton had sexually abused or exploited one or both of them before they turned 16. Clearly, the freedom of the sexual revolution had been deeply distorted in this bohemian household in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. How could this have happened? How to comprehend such awful parenting from an intelligent, middle-class mother, even one who openly touted her love of sex? Could sexual mores have been so different back then that this was seen as unusual but not outlandish? Do we need to put the events in the context of the times?

Author Helen Garner bristles at the suggestion that things were different 40 years ago. “Not THAT bloody different!” she shot back on email this week. “These stories horrify and enrage me, and they would have horrified and enraged me if I’d heard them in the 70s. I met Dorothy and Merv very briefly, as writers, when they were old. In my encounters with them they struck me as kind, friendly people, somewhat the worse for wear; I liked them. Only a fool would make grand generalisations about other people’s sexual mores in any era you care to name. But at no stage, in my circles and in my experience and observations of what people now call the sexual revolution of the 70s, would it have been considered anything other than outrageous for young girls to be sexually preyed upon by their parents’ friends.” Garner’s outrage notwithstanding, it’s interesting to examine why sexual codes had become so unmoored from conventional morality - at least in some circles - in that period.

Richard Walsh, the co-founder of the 60s satirical magazine OZ is an astute observer of that period when he and others skewered traditional views on everything from politics to sex.

Looking back, Walsh, one of our best-known publishers, sees a great deal of collateral damage from the rush to shake off a time when, for example, sex before marriage was beyond the pale and when women were confined to the kitchen. “It was a time when the puritanism of the 40s and 50s had been thrown off,” he says. “It was truly a revolution, not an evolution — and like all revolutions, there was lot of blood in the streets. We emerged, we over-emerged, from the 40s and 50s. In a way, Dorothy typified a kind of thinking that sex was wonderful and we should not put any limits on it. But stories like this show us that the way we thought about sex was wrong and that the 60s in particular was a period of exploitation of women in different ways to what had happened in the past.”

The expectation that women would love sex as much as Hewett claimed to underpinned much of the behaviour around sex among some groups. Anne Coombs’s 1996 book Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push looked at the codes that operated among the left-wing intellectual group that from the 40s through to the mid-70s argued for libertarian values. Says Coombs: “In the Sixties and Seventies, people felt freedom was about being sexually free. Women were trying to be like men in their casualness around sex, the idea that it should be taken lightly.” When Coombs interviewed women decades after their time in the Push, they spoke of the expectations from men in the group that they would always be sexually available. “They would never say they were exploited, but that there were expectations,” she says. “The sexual freedom allowed by the Pill preceded the feminist revolution of the Seventies and the analysis of how women had been so conditioned to their roles.”

In the early days of the Push the ages of men and women were similar and there was less of the power imbalance that emerged in the 60s and 70s when the men were often at least 15 years older than the women in the group. Coombs says many younger women were flattered by the attention of these older, seasoned players. “It’s easy to forget when you look back that it was quite flattering. There were very young girls who were seen as ‘Push heroines’ because they were so into it. It’s hard to know if they were under¬age, but there would have been girls as young as 15 or 16.” That women in the 60s were treated poorly by men who were otherwise sophisticated thinkers was recognised by one of the Push leaders, Roelof Smilde, who told Coombs he realised later in his life that the men of the Push had been kidding themselves when they argued women and men were equal in the group.

The hypocrisy of the times is still vivid for Marsha Rowe, who in 1972 co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib. An Australian who had worked on OZ magazine in Sydney and later in London before joining Rosie Boycott in the publishing venture, she looks back in some anger still.

Rowe won’t comment on the Hewett case but says from Britain, where she still lives: “It went without saying (in the 60s) that any sexual abuse, or abuse of trust, or taking advantage, as in underage sex, was and is abhorrent. But these were subjects that emerged later on, partly as a result of the women’s movement. So much that was hidden — rape, domestic violence — it was the woman, the victim, who was thought to be at fault back then, not the perpetrator.” Despite the hypocrisy, her cohort of young women did not consider they lacked agency in sexual encounters. “When I was young, it was regarded as OK for boys to sow their wild oats, but girls were meant to stay chaste, even virginal, before marriage,” says Rowe. “The sexuality of the underground press and all of the straight media was through a male lens. And women were sex objectified.” But at the same time, “no one ever mentioned being coerced into a sexual relationship or sexual encounter that they did not want. No woman I knew sought sex dis¬connected from relationships or from love.” Rowe and Boycott launched Spare Rib after a famous meeting of women who worked in the underground press, including OZ. She recalls: “When I called that first meeting of women who worked in the underground press, in November 1971, what was revealed was the other side of the sexual freedom for women during the 60s, and that was the women who had babies who had been adopted, or they’d had abortions, illegal and legal.” Rowe notes that questions about power did not really emerge until much later in the 70s. “The impact of women’s liberation on personal relationships was huge, but only very slowly did these questions about personal relationships emerge into wider discourse,” she says. “No one complained about ¬sexual freedom per se. After all, what we had objected to was the double standard. So the contradiction for us women, as discussed at that meeting, was not about agency, in terms of sexual freedom/choice, but about the contradiction between that relative freedom/independence and the way women still did the housework, the cooking, the childcare at home, and the fact that women did not have a voice in the underground press but did all the typing and office work.”

Walsh agrees that women were often oppressed in this period but says that Sydney OZ was very different from London OZ — where Sharp and Richard Neville were key players — which was deeply embedded in the rock ’n’ roll and drugs culture. “In London, Richard (Neville) and Martin (Sharp) were pop stars who didn’t sing,” he says. “Richard knew John Lennon, Martin lived with Eric Clapton. There was a lot of pressure on the women involved, the idea that ‘our kind of people’ took their clothes off all the time and had sex everywhere. It was pretty free and easy and the women didn’t necessarily have great choices.” Walsh is aware, of course, that Neville admitted in his 70s memoir Play Power that in his 20s in London he had a “hurricane f..k” with a 14-year-old schoolgirl. But Walsh says interest in young girls was not “part of his (Neville’s) makeup at all”. He goes on: “Richard had always been magnetically attractive to women and in London the OZ scene overlapped with rock ’n’ roll … they lived in a world of pop groupies and young artists and fashion models, but it was not remotely an underage milieu. “But neither Richard nor pop stars were asking to see anyone’s birth certificate.”

In contrast, Sharp, who was revealed last week as having slept with Rozanna Lilley when she was 15, was known to have a strong interest in young women. Says Walsh: “I wasn’t aware of that (the Lilley event) at the time, but Richard and I used to roll our eyes knowing that Martin was always interested in younger women. His taste in women did not age with him. We were conscious that was part of his psyche. We thought of him as a Peter Pan character who never grew up. I guess we didn’t think it through hard enough to wonder if any of these people were underage. It became more obvious as he got older and I remember thinking that he was 40 or 50 and still interested in girls of 20. If you place great store by youthfulness and the idea of physical perfection … that was the trouble with Marty. For a long time he had an aesthetic of physical perfection. It was an era that glorified physical beauty. We still live in a world that glorifies physical beauty and I don’t know a way out of that.” For Neville, in particular, these decades were filled with occasions when he deliberately broke sexual taboos in his professional life. Back in Sydney in 1975, he produced a program on pederasty for Radio National that attracted huge controversy because it was seen as not challenging the experience of men having sex with boys. Neville had, of course, been blooded earlier when with Walsh and Sharp (and later in London with others) he had fronted court on OZ obscenity charges that have become synonymous with this period of sexual upheaval.

Of the Hewett case, Walsh says: “I think there were other mothers besides Dorothy who were careless parents. I am sure she was in some ways a good mother. But you have to accept that this was abuse and they were extremely damaged. But it’s intriguing that while the Lilley daughters were damaged, they went on to carve out extraordinarily effective lives compared with some of the people who were abused in orphanages, for example.” Walsh says that while we live in a time where there is nostalgia for the past, there is one area - sex - where no one argues we should turn back the clock. “No one talks about going back to a time when a woman had to be a virgin at marriage,” he says. “We have accepted that young people are free to explore their sexuality, but in getting there we have gone down some very dark alleys. We can see the damage that was done when people overcompensated for the oppression of the 40s and 50s. But some aspects of the #MeToo movement are problematic and we may feel in five or 10 years we have overreacted again. Maybe philosophically that has to happen. You have extremes and out of it all something good emerges - but gee whiz, there’s a lot of collateral damage.”

'To paint her as evil is wrong': Hewett's son censures sisters

Dorothy Hewett's children are at a 'standoff' over her daughters' claims she enable their sexual abuse.

Rosemary Neill

"I'm fond of my sisters but not as fond as I am of my mother," says Joe Flood, son of legendary playwright Dorothy Hewett, who has been accused of "facilitating" her daughters' sexual abuse and exploitation within the 1970s arts scene. Flood's remark reflects a growing schism within the prominent literary family following the disturbing claims about Hewett (and predatory men from the arts milieu) that were published by this newspaper last weekend. 'We've got a standoff position, unfortunately," Flood says of his relationship with his sisters Kate Lilley and Rozanna Lilley. However, Rozanna, an author and academic researcher, has accused her half-brother "and some other parties" of trying to "intimidate or bully us into silence".

Last weekend, Kate and Rozanna revealed how their mother, a revered feminist and creator of acclaimed plays including The Chapel Perilous and This Old Man Comes Rolling Home, was so "damaged" and lacking in "moral boundaries", she "encouraged" their early sexualisation and exploitation by male artists twice their age, in the 70s bohemian arts world. Kate, a poet and an associate professor of English at University of Sydney, likened the family home in Sydney's east to "a brothel without payment ... There were constantly men staying in the house and hardly any man came to the house who didn't try to have sex with one or more of us (Kate, Rozanna or Dorothy)." Both women agreed their mother equated sex - including underage sex involving her daughters - with female liberation. Kate, 57, claimed she was sexually assaulted by a film producer when she was 15, only to be raped, months later, by a visiting poet. Her mother dismissed her claim about the rape and went on to have a relationship with the same poet, who also slept with Rozanna.

He was not the only man who allegedly slept with the teenage Kate and her mother. Kate and Rozanna also alleged that - among a long list of male artists who assaulted, exploited or had underage sex with them were the deceased celebrities Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and David Hamilton. Flood, a housing industry consultant, was one of four sons Hewett gave birth to before she met her daughters' father, Merv Lilley, and he had a radically different upbringing to that of his sisters in freewheeling 70s Sydney. He says she was strict, "kind", "lovely" and the "greatest supporter of my life ... for them (his sisters) to paint her as some sort of evil figure is incorrect'. He has accused his sisters of using the abuse allegations to sell their latest books, which address a range of topics including their scarred teenage years. He backs his sisters' claims about underage sex occurring in the family home, but insists his mother had "limited agency” within her marriage to Lilley. "I absolutely believe that, and they (his sisters) don't," he says. "Merv should have stepped in and taken control, but he didn't. A father has got a responsibility." Flood blames Merv Lilley and the men who took advantage of his sisters, rather than Hewett, for the abuses that occurred. He concedes, nonetheless, that after his mother had treatment for painful gallstones in the 70s, "she rushed around like a maniac. She was in her 50s, for heaven's sake, and she was getting all these boyfriends all over the place - it was embarrassing. It lasted quite a while, three or four years, before she calmed down." He says it was ''bad luck" his half-sisters were teenagers at the same time the "rotten boyfriends" were around. Flood's ex-wife Adele Flood, a retired academic who was Hewett's daughter-in-law for nearly four decades, says she is "angry'' about the allegations. She reveals that decades ago, "Dorothy was very protective of me when she found I was being abused by my stepfather. She took steps to ensure that I made a report to the Child Welfare Department in WA. She was very supportive of my writing and art work. I admired her, found her energy for life invigorating. She was colourful and exotic. People flocked to her." She points out Hewett was the grandmother of her children. "I loved her and this (the abuse claims) has caused me a great deal of distress."

However, Kate Lilley has responded that it is "preposterous" for Flood to assume he knew what she and her sister went through in the 70s, given he had already moved out of the family home. Moreover, in a letter sent to Kate this week, a high-profile writer recalls Hewett asking him if he was planning to "f .. k" her daughters at a 70s playwrights' conference. The writer told Hewett he did not sleep with children. Kate says this occurred at the 1976 National Playwrights' Conference, held in Canberra when she was 15, Rozanna was 13 and Hewett's play, The Golden Oldies, was being work-shopped.

Kate says she ended having underage sex with a theatre director in his 30s at that conference. Rozanna, who has told her story privately to the royal commission into child abuse, says of her half-brother's criticisms: "I have a right to tell my story and to be treated as an important human being, like every other human being. I was trying to understand what happened, and to express my sadness and anger over those years." She adds that "it is not 'bad luck' to have a mother who engages in sexual competition with her daughters. Katie's story is worse than mine in this regard and I will only speak to mine. There is neglect, there is narcissism and there is something fundamentally wrong." This week, Hewett's former publisher Katharine Brisbane said the allegations made by the playwright's daughters could have an adverse impact on her standing as an admired literary figure. However, the University of Western Australia has no plans to scrap its annual Dorothy Hewett Award for unpublished manuscripts.

Rozanna says: "Dorothy's standing may be affected ... (but) it's not my job to worry about that ... She was a wonderful talent. To point to someone's flaws and instabilities is not to say they are worthless or any less of a writer." Kate says responses to her and Rozanna' s allegations - which have been reported around the nation - have been "overwhelmingly supportive". She says critics from within her family hold the mistaken belief that ''you can't love Mum and say what is true".

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* Saturday, 16 June 2018, The Saturday Paper, Martin Mackenzie-Murray.

‘Disassociated from normal morality’

The sexual abuse of Dorothy Hewett’s two teenage daughters in the 1970s reveals a culture subservient to a myth of artistic freedom.

Rozanna Lilley didn't recognise the description. Intellectually, sure. But as it applied to her? No way. Lilley was in the office of her therapist, seven or eight years ago. It was their first session. To begin, Lilley tentatively offered a disclosure about her childhood. Tentatively, because she was unsure of its relevance. "Okay, I'm going to tell you a few things now in case it's important." The therapist listened gravely. When Lilley finished, he said: "So, you were an abused child." "Was I?" she replied. It was hard to integrate." There was sort of almost an argument, where I've always stressed my agency; but he was trying to make me see that I wasn't responsible for the things that happened to me at 11, 13, 14," Lilley told me this week. "If you just completely embrace the victim attitude, where does that leave you? You need somewhere to move. But that said, there were just cases of creepy people who groomed me. I don't know I've completely reconciled it now." Lilley is the youngest child of the late Dorothy Hewett, the radical left-wing and feminist poet, playwright and novelist. In 1942, Hewett joined the Communist Party, and her 1959 social-realist novel Bobbin Up was later translated into Russian. Before its publication, Hewett visited Stalin's blood-stained empire, and while she suspected things weren't so golden as she might have assumed - "In 1952, in the year of Stalin, I came to Russia and saw flowers growing out of the blinkers on my eyes" - she would not renounce her party membership until the tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968. But it was Hewett's commitment to another destructive idea that Lilley was discussing with her therapist, and would later explore in her recent book, Do Oysters Get Bored? The Hewett-Lilley household - Hewett was married to her second husband, the writer Merv Lilley, in 1960 - functioned as a debauched salon. Dorothy Hewett held court on a golden sofa while Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen played on the turntable, celebrity intellectuals debated the merits of Shelley and Marx, and her youngest daughters were routinely sexually exploited with her encouragement. In a lengthy interview with The Australian last week, Rozanna and her sister, Kate, candidly discussed the abuse: predatory, opportunistic and promoted by aggressively laissez faire attitudes to sexual "liberation". Before they had reached the age of consent, each girl had been assaulted many times, abuses often "facilitated" by their mother. Names were given: David Hamilton, a British photographer and child pornographer, who killed himself in 2016 after allegations of child rape; Martin Sharp, a once world-renowned artist; and the late screenwriter, playwright, polemicist and Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis. Kate Lilley has also alleged an unnamed poet raped her. This list is not exhaustive. "I said sarcastically in therapy one day: 'What should I do, take an ad out in The Spectator?'" Rozanna Lilley tells me, referring to the abuse she suffered from Ellis. "His reputation was well known. I don't think he had a particular thing for young girls. I think he just had a go whenever he could. He was well known for his come-on line: 'How about a fuck?' And he used to always say how he was always amazed with how many said 'Yes.' "The thing is, when you're brought up where all of this is normalised, I didn't think that there was anything wrong. You just thought it was part of life, and you went along. Bob was a terrific raconteur, a very funny man. From me, he would take 'No' as an answer. In many ways, to me at the time, it seemed that they were very kind to me. It was an important relationship at the time. That's sad in itself, I guess. I can see it intellectually, but I can't feel it." In her book, Lilley describes being cast at 13 years old in her mother's film, Journey Among Women, about a remote lesbian utopia, comprising escaped convicts. "On screen, I was intermittently raped and fondled and finally murdered," she writes. "The nadir of this formative pubescent experience came when word went out on set that I had begun bleeding for the first time. A meeting was held and I was approached with the suggestion that my onset of menarche be documented and incorporated into the storyline of the film. I declined."

In the 1970s, Bob Ellis was a long-haired aesthete, a columnist and playwright. By his own account, his ambition burned brightly. Plenty of others can testify. He was also a sexual opportunist, and almost proud of it. This is a story of a certain time - a much too recent one - when children were treated as sexual chattel. A story of a subculture's torrid belief in the primacy of art. And a story of a gifted, but damaged, woman's psychology, projected onto her children. "Mum always said that when she was younger she wanted to be a grown-up lady in a house with a hundred lovers," Lilley tells me. "And I think she literally tried to create this, down to the gold sofas and tassels on the lights. There's a lot of romanticism there. She'd get in some terrible tangles in her life, and she would always say: 'But I was in love.' Her idea of herself was adolescent. She had this fixed view of herself as a beautiful young woman that men wanted. When I was very young, Mum told me that the worst thing a woman could be was a cockteaser. You can look at a poem of hers where she's talking about my sister and I and how bitter she was that men were interested in us, and she's reporting someone else saying, 'They are your surrogates.' So she's quite aware of these very, very strange dynamics that were going on, that I think my sister and I have spent much of our adult lives trying to extricate ourselves psychologically from that mess. She had a failing there, and it's because, I think, she wanted to be the centre of attention and she struggled in getting older. This flamboyant bohemianism, like a later version of the Sydney Push, had a very negative impact upon myself and my sister. [My mother] didn't believe in shielding children from anything. But she was out of the mainstream of belief. She was very extreme about it. It was also a milieu that characteristically has disassociated itself from conventional morality. Sometimes that's good - say, in providing a haven for gay people in the theatre for many decades - but sometimes that's been negative in terms of what it's allowed people to get away with. In the entertainment industry, and the arts, there's a terrific lot of insecure narcissists that are far more likely to engage in this kind of behaviour."

This was the underbelly of Hewett's iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that was publicly admired in her lifetime and fondly remembered in her death. Eulogising Hewett in 2002, the editor of the literary journal Overland commended her "nose-thumbing, her complete disregard for the mores that prevented others from saying things, and her political commitment". Lilley doesn't hate her mother. Or Ellis. Or many of the others. A theme in her book, and our conversation, is ambivalence. Ambivalence about certain individuals, ambivalence about the description "abused". Lilley spoke to me about her mother's gift, her hospitality, her charm. In past years, she has read her mother's poetry at festivals. In her book, she describes the unusual experience of seeing her mother's ghost - an actor who had once played her on stage. She first saw her on a TV commercial, then in the local shopping mall, then her doctor's surgery. Intellectually, she knew she couldn't commune with her mother through this woman. But she approached her anyway. Introduced herself. There was polite small talk. Nothing more. Her mother, of course, couldn't be summoned through this random proxy. Lilley is not defined by the abuse, and nor is her book. An anthropologist and autism researcher - her son Oscar is autistic - her memoir is an oddly original braiding of poetry, reminiscence and meditations on the precocious interior life of her son. "It's not a statutory rape narrative," she tells me. Lilley is far too curious to condemn her book so narrowly. But across its pages you can see the enormous shadow her mother still casts.

I did it. As an earnest undergraduate, I embraced the Artist as a saint or psychic cosmonaut, a person made heroic not merely by their risks and genius, but their resignation to that risk and genius being repaid with contempt or indifference. It was a cosy belief, and I enjoyed the reflected glow. As a young and naive man, I vibrated with enthusiasm more than intelligence. Eventually, my worship dwindled. I sobered up from cultish intoxications. Increasingly, I saw myths of artistic excess as tiresome and unhealthy. I stopped confusing notoriety for talent. Call it maturity. William Burroughs was a paedophile who recklessly shot his wife dead and blamed the bullet's fatal trajectory on "Ugly Spirits". Burroughs' mate, Allen Ginsberg, was equally creative in rationalising the crime: the writer's wife had willed it to happen. Consider James Baldwin's explanation for Norman Mailer's near-fatal stabbing of his wife: it was an attempt at existential liberation. Mailer's own liberation, of course. Not his wife's. It would require surgeons to liberate her from death. Remarkably, Mailer sought to advise them before the operation. Before I completed my undergraduate degree in English, I had learnt that bohemian intellectuals could justify anything, and that the fetishisation of art was unhealthy, almost creepy. My most personal disavowal was of Hunter S. Thompson - a writer to whom the former South Australian premier, Mike Rann, compared Bob Ellis while eulogising his friend in 2016. Rann wasn't the first to compare these two addled renegades. There are meaningful comparisons between the two, but unflattering ones. These I am yet to read. Thompson's good years were few. After Nixon resigned, he was reduced to writing self-parodies in geographic isolation while impaired by the excesses he had helped mythologise. His life and death slightly mirrored the decline of his hero, Hemingway, who had also retreated to America's mountains first to commit self-parody, then suicide by gunshot. Convinced by his own legend, or the pharmacology that helped secure it, Thompson felt he could smash his strange correspondence very far away from the things he wrote about. His connection to the world was mediated by cocaine and cable TV. When the towers fell, the famous journalist-adventurer was watching from a couch in the Colorado woods, and filing his screeds for ESPN. All of these men's books remain on my shelves. It's obscene that they might be thrown out or, much worse, collectively torched. As Philip Roth once said, literature shouldn't be a moral beauty pageant. But that artists might consider themselves rarefied nauseates me, as do lofty words such as "bravery" and "nobility", used to describe the work of some of its privileged practitioners. My antidote to this horseshit comes from the late novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick: "Art is a profession, not a shrine."

In a 1979 essay for New Poetry, Dorothy Hewett wrote about the Australian poets Robert Adamson and Michael Dransfield, the latter having died six years earlier at the age of 24, likely from drugs. "The difficulty with Dransfield and Adamson has been to separate the fire from the smoke, the romantic cult from the work itself," she wrote. "Like all committed romantics both have, of course, collaborated in the creation of their own sensational mythology, and then let it roll." Hewett had collaborated in her own, and then let it roll. So did Hunter S. Thompson. So did Bob Ellis. Many years ago at a Labor fundraiser book fair at the home of an ambitious hack, I was talking with a former party secretary when I picked up a copy of Bob Ellis's Night Thoughts in Time of War. "Our Vidal," he said, pointing to the book, which suggests something of the witless reverence the party once had for him. For a while, Ellis was the party's Falstaff - outsized, louche, loquacious and ardently soused. At least, that's how he liked to see it. And for a few younger hacks, those who considered themselves decent with a pen, Ellis suggested a romantic alternative to the prosaic reality of media releases and talking points. I say now as I did then that Vidal and Ellis shared little but a pungent ego and, in later years, a propensity for grotesque conspiracy theories. One of Ellis's last was that the recently vanished MH370 airliner had been hijacked by the American government and secreted on some remote Pacific base. He was insistent about this. I can't recall what methods and motivations Ellis dreamed up for this extraordinary rendition, and his blog - prolifically deposited with abuse, aphorisms and crank notions – is gone. The Wayback Machine has captured only so much. In Night Thoughts Ellis muses about the CIA's responsibility for the Bali bombings. It strikes me now that his energetic spewing of conspiracies resembled his lecherous approach to women. It was a shameless method, discomforting to many, and described to me in bookie parlance by one person who knew him as "betting to place" - beg a hundred women to sleep with you, and one will. Politically and sexually, in Ellis's head I'm not sure it ever stopped being 1972. Ellis carried in his head the secretive, bizarre and destructive abuses of American power: Bay of Pigs; MKUltra; the violent, clandestine interference with South American governments. But I'm not sure he ever did much with his paranoid inventory: Ellis was neither Seymour Hersh, who as a journalist exposed deep American squalor; nor Don DeLillo, who communed with American history and paranoia to create a few classic novels. Ellis, the great writer, left no great books. He didn't have the discipline. He was too busy harassing women, enemies and his liver. He will be best remembered for a tawdry paternity case and a defamation suit he lost, involving a sexual slur against Tony Abbott, Peter Costello and their wives. It cost his publisher perhaps a half-million dollars and a great deal of respect. Ellis was an eloquent crank, who espoused bizarre theories and consistently wrong predictions about election outcomes or the tenure of political leaderships. I lost count of the wayward prognostications, but what was remarkable was his unchastened insistence on them. Betting to place. Like Hunter S. Thompson, Ellis revelled in hyperbolic invective and, like Thompson, he could make music with it. Among his last pieces were gossip columns for this paper. But the danger in being melodious is that you might neglect ideas, and for all of Ellis's gifts his music was often lazy - emotional appeals to an already secured audience. Then there was the abject hyperbole: "I have not thus far used the adjective 'evil' in the last fifty years on anyone: not on Hitler, Eichmann, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama, Nixon, Thatcher, W, John Howard ... But Scott Morrison is evil."

That line should appear self-evidently absurd, but I might add that if offshore detention - the policy that prompted the screed above - had so repulsed him, it didn't stop Ellis from stalking the corridors of Parliament House and bum-rushing some of the policy's architects and endorsers so he might press upon them his latest emulation of Cicero for their use. To the very end, Ellis was the self-conscious rebel who still desperately sought the ear of power. "He was certainly loitering in people's offices offering up words for speeches until just before he died," one Labor MP told me. "Beyond that, I don't think he ever had 'influence' in terms of shaping people's actions or anything." Then there was the self-aggrandisement. Ellis was always casual with truth and energetic in his defamations. A few years before his death, he lamented that the ABC's Tony Jones was a man "who votes Liberal and banned me from Q&A although I did well on it" - a short line that contains at least two mistruths. Perhaps he saw his rhetoric in the service of some higher Truth. He was less interested in facts. His looseness was a marker of his ego - like many a gifted rhetorician, he believed his music was sufficiently enchanting and truthful. "Bob Hope is dead," Ellis wrote in 2003. "For a week, a lot of ink has been spent by old men asking if he was funny. Like the similar question 'Can Laurence Olivier act?' it misses the point, for whatever else he was he was a fact of history. He imposed himself, like Larry, on his chosen culture." I have no doubt that Ellis thought of himself in this way, as the gifted and wilful artist who imposed himself upon his chosen culture. Which is fine. Our culture's health requires the gifted and wilful. Ellis was both, even if he was an awful custodian of his talents. But we might now consider how he sexually imposed himself upon women - and children - and how his lofty self-conception fed those impositions. His advances and exploitations were shameless, notorious and damaging. Ellis was an insistent diarist of his penis. Driven, like so many Saints of Letters, by a libido he mistook for a symptom of creative vitality, or some larger cosmic hunger, its satisfaction appeared to him as just reward for his talent.

"In the artistic scene then, many of these people have an enormously high opinion of themselves," Rozanna Lilley told me this week. "Many of them think they're geniuses, and many others think of them as geniuses. And the basic attitude is that you'd be lucky to have anything to do with them. You'd be lucky to have sex with them. Like they're doing you a favour. That's a part of the artistic milieu then."

Sympathy can work its way strangely, sometimes without us noticing. One reason for listing Ellis's artistic flaws is that their forgiveness or oversight by fellow travellers was likely cut from similar cloth as the laughing treatment of his sleaze. Had Ellis been a right-wing polemicist, his slander, kooky theories and serially inaccurate forecasts would not have been overlooked or dismissed as charming eccentricities. I suspect the same holds for his lechery. Writing this, however, I realise it isn't quite true. In the end, Ellis was a fairly marginal figure. Mostly ignored by the ALP, he published on his blog. About his late writing, at least, some judgements were made. Still, he was buried by at least three former premiers. Bill Shorten made a speech, laughing at his excesses: "If I had a dollar for every letter he sent, I'd almost be able to afford the legal costs of using them."

Since the Lilley sisters' interview was published this week, there have been a few distorting interpretations. Rozanna mentions to me one headline, since vanished, about an "arts paedophile ring". "As if anyone in the arts scene was organised enough to be in a paedophile ring," she laughs. The sexual exploitation of children didn't require some hushed and sophisticated organisation. There was no conspiracy. It just was. Sex with kids was normal. All part of the artist's entitlement; all part of the enlightened salon. It just was. "Most of us love our mothers," Lilley tells me. "Mine was in many ways very loveable. She was childlike in a lot of ways. She liked to play on that passivity, that she was helpless. That was one of her schticks. But there were blank spots in her. I don't know if it was a personality disorder. She was a troubled woman. She had tried to kill herself. People think in very black and white ways, but ambivalence is the right term. I think."

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* Monday, 18 June 2018, The West Australian, Andrew Bolt.

Child sex and the arts

I’m not surprised to hear that famed Australian playwright Dorothy Hewett virtually pimped out her underaged daughters. Hewett, a long-time communist, was part of a push to destroy all sexual taboos, and even today our arts community sends dangerously mixed messages about sex with children. In fact, in the same week that Hewett’s two daughters revealed they’d slept with several artists before they were 16 - “facilitated” by their mother - I was alerted to a short story still studied in Victorian schools. Onionskinny, by Campbell Mattinson, starts: “There have been times when I’ve thought that the best thing about making love to an eleven-year-old was the pure secret joy of it.” It describes in detail how the male protagonist, also 11, first has sex with his girlfriend, and ends: “I never had, and never have again, felt so unleashed.” Onionskinny was included in The Best Australia Stories – a Ten Year Collection that until 2016 was a VCE text for Victorian students, even though it celebrates underaged sex.

But the arts community has a history of dismissing such concerns as the moralising of troglodytes who don’t know their arts from their elbow, while it smashes the sexual mores that protect children. I was vividly reminded of this by the roll-call of some of the men who raped Hewett’s daughters, Kate and Roz¬anna. Kate says six men had sex with her before she reached the legal age of consent at 16. Rozanna counts “at least a dozen”. The sisters have so far named only the men now safely dead, but that list is telling. Both say they had sex with writer Bob Ellis, for instance, an amoral slob who also wrote speeches for Labor leaders including Bill Shorten. Ellis may have been defending his own pleasures, then, when in 2011 he wrote a piece for the ABC complaining about attacks on film director Roman Polanski, who’d raped a 13-year-old girl. “Polanski, accused of pederasty, correctly, made no more Hollywood films, and despite his evident genius was blocked, harassed and menaced for 35 years,” wrote Ellis. “It is not fair.”

But more significant than Ellis on the sisters’ list are British photographer David Hamilton and Australian artist Martin Sharp. Hamilton was internationally famed for his soft-porn pictures of young women and under-aged girls - images defended as art. In fact, Hamilton was actually a sex creep who, disguised as an artist, had sex with Rozanna Lilley and took close-ups of her genitals when she was just 14 or 15. He committed suicide in 2016 after a French presenter accused him of raping her when she was just 13. Hmm. Maybe the boundary between art and porn isn’t as strict as artists insist.

And that becomes clearer with Martin Sharp. With Richard Neville and Richard Walsh, Sharp created the famous counterculture magazine Oz, which attacked sexual conventions and landed the three men in court on charges of obscenity. No taboo was sacred. Neville, for instance, in his 1970 book Play Power boasted of having a “hurricane f..k” with a 14-year-old girl. In 1975, he even hosted an ABC radio show where he let three pedophiles explain – unchallenged – their desire for young boys. Richard Downing, then ABC chairman, defended the show, saying “in general, men will sleep with young boys”. How different things were then, when pedophile priests were also most active. Indeed, in 1976, Britain’s National Council for Civil Liberties – then headed by Australian Patricia Hewitt - even called for the age of consent to be lowered to age 10. So Martin Sharp took his licence as an artist, and slept with Rozanna Lilley when she was 15.

Sharp bobbed up again a decade ago in a way that once more showed art is too often an excuse for switching off the moral compass. Police had raided a Sydney art gallery to seize photographs by Bill Henson, also famed for his sultry images of nude young girls. Our arts community again waved its special licence. Henson’s images were art, not porn, protested more than 40 artists, including actor Cate Blanchett. The Law Society of NSW backed Henson’s right to display the nude body of a 12-year-old girl, and Sharp, too, spoke out. “It was a powerful image. I would call it very beautiful in its vulnerability”, said the man who’d himself enjoyed sex with a vulnerable 15-year-old. So how can I be surprised by what Hewett’s daughters have revealed? Who’d trust our arts community to know what it takes to protect our children?

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* Tuesday, 19 June 2018, The Hub on Books, ABC Radio National, Claire Nichols (interviewer).

Sisters Rozanna and Kate Lilley on their mother, writer Dorothy Hewett

Dorothy Hewett's daughters Rozanna and Kate Lilley talk about re-casting their mum's image in the age of #MeToo Dorothy Hewett is remembered as a leading poet, playwright and novelist. Admired for her passionate and politically charged writing, she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to literature in 1986. But what will happen to her legacy in the light of revelations of the sexual abuse of her teenage daughters? Sisters Kate and Rozanna Lilley say they were sexually assaulted by the men who visited the family home in the 1970s. The abuse, they say, was encouraged by their mother. The women have named late Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis and pop artist Martin Sharp amongst those who assaulted them. The sisters have written of their experiences in two separate books, and have received criticism from some artistic circles for coming forward with their stories.

"This has all been very well known for a very long time," says Kate Lilley, who is a poet and academic. "I think that a lot of the blowback saying that we're harming Mum's reputation is really just in disguise a critique of men from that generation, the kind of men who abused us and their supporters, who don't want their behaviour to be examined." Lilley says that her mother's work has always been polarising, with many finding her confronting descriptions of sex distasteful. "Mum wrote plenty about competing sexually with us," she says. In one poem, Hewett wrote about young men partnering "her naked girls".

Kate Lilley, who has written about her experiences in the book Tilt, says people are looking at her mother's poetry with fresh eyes, in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Rozanna Lilley is a writer and autism researcher. Like her sister, she has come forward with her own stories of abuse, in her book Do Oysters Get Bored. "I don't actually think it's my job at this point to worry about my mother's reputation," she says. "This is not about impugning my mother's reputation as a writer, in fact it's not even about impugning my mother. It's about writing a story about what happened to me in a particular point in time, in my adolescence."

Teenagers in an adult world

Kate and Rozanna Lilley were 13 and 11 when they moved to Sydney with their mother and father, the writer Merv Lilley. The family's Woollahra home was a gathering place for the 1970s arts scene, with artists, writers and musicians coming for long dinners and often staying the night. Kate Lilley says her mother encouraged the teenagers to have sex with some of those visitors. "She really believed that she was doing something great for us by involving us in this adult, rather louche world," she says. In her poem Party Favour, Kate Lilley describes being assaulted by a film producer, and a visiting poet. The teenage Lilley went to her mother for help, but Hewett didn't believe her.

I'll tell my mother and she'll say

she asked him he said I was into it

from then on I know it's pointless

she's not on my side

From Party Favour

Rozanna Lilley remembers her mother encouraging her to go on the pill when she was 14 years old. "She just seemed to have … a blind spot in relation to my sister and I and our needs when we were teenagers," she says. "It is very difficult for me to understand her position at that time. When I think of her I have a whole range of feelings." In her book, Rozanna Lilley says her mother did not intentionally hurt her. But she didn't protect her either. "She had a pretty good idea of what was going on in her own house, and she imaginatively recast those predations as adventures, confirming our familial superiority to restrictive moral norms," she writes.

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* Wednesday, 20 June 2018, The Australian, Rosemary Neill.

Rename Hewett award: Senator Cory Bernardi

Senator Cory Bernardi will today call for the renaming of a literary award created to honour Dorothy Hewett, following allegations the playwright and poet “facilitated” her daughters’ sexual abuse. Yesterday, the South Australian filed a notice of ¬motion in the Senate, noting how one of Hewett’s daughters had likened the family home in the 1970s to “a brothel without payment’’. In his motion, Senator Bernardi said he “considers it completely inappropriate that an award might bear the name of a person accused by her own children of pimping them to be sex¬ually abused by paedophiles”.

Hewett’s daughters have not described the abuse they endured, or their relationship with their mother, in those terms. Now aged in their 50s, Hewett’s daughters, Kate Lilley and Rozanna Lilley, have told The Australian their mother “facilitated” their early sexualisation in the 1970s bohemian arts milieu. They said they were abused or exploited by arts figures Bob Ellis, Martin Sharp and David Hamilton, while they were under the age of consent.

The Senate is expected to vote today on Senator Bernardi’s demand that the $10,000 award for unpublished manuscripts be renamed. However, the University of Western Australia, which runs the award, has said it has no plans to rebadge the prize. UWA publishing director Terri-Ann White said Hewett’s daughters wanted the name retained. “If the family were to instruct us to change our position, we would do so,’’ Ms White said. Kate Lilley said last night her mother’s “reputation as a major literary figure is based on award-winning plays, poems, novels and autobiography collected in more than 20 volumes, a remarkable achievement. The fact that she was a generous mentor and inspiration to many writers across many genres makes her an especially appropriate namesake for this award.’’

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* Wednesday, 21 June 2018. Australian Senate.

Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives)

I seek leave to amend general business notice of motion No. 851 standing in my name for today. The terms of the amendment were circulated in the chamber earlier.

Leave granted.

I move the motion as amended:

That the Senate—

(a) notes the allegations made by the daughters of the late Dorothy Hewett that she pimped her then-minor daughters for sex;

(b) further notes that one daughter described their home as 'a brothel without payment' and the sisters named perpetrators including:

(i) the late former Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis,

(ii) pop artist Martin Sharp, and

(iii) British erotic photographer David Hamilton;

(c) also notes that the University of Western Australia runs a $10,000 annual prize named the 'Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript', which is an award supported in 2019 by The Saturday Paper and the Copyright Agency; and

(d) in light of the seriousness of the allegations, calls upon the Education Minister to seek assurances from the University of Western Australia that it will:

(i) rename the award, or

(ii) in the event that naming rights are a condition of the prize, to suspend the award until the allegations are investigated and resolved.

James McGrath (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister)

The allegations detailed in this motion are abhorrent and have rightly attracted condemnation. The officer of the Minister for Education and Training has raised these concerns with the University of Western Australia.

Question agreed to.

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* Thursday, 21 June 2018, Overland, Jeff Sparrow.

The Devil’s Decade

In wake of the revelations by Rozanna and Kate Lilley about the sexual abuse they endured as children, Senator Cory Bernardi wants to rebrand the literary prize named after their mother, Dorothy Hewett. It’s an illustration of how this awful story’s become, inevitably a battering ram for culture warriors. If Bernardi cared an iota for the Lilleys, he would, before going to the press or preparing his idiotic Senate motion, have spoken to them – at which point he would have learned that Kate, at least, doesn’t want the award renamed. But, for Senator Grandstand, that’s neither here nor there. Australian conservatives (both of the lower- and upper-case variety) care tremendously, you see, about the Great Works of Western Civilisation, but much less so about actual books – objects they associate with the effete degenerates of the intelligentsia, who will, Bernardi assumes, be pleasingly discomforted by a parliamentary motion condemning a prominent novelist. He’s not concerned about the Lilleys’ pain and how it might be assuaged. He’s latched onto an opportunity to embarrass those dreaded literary elites.

Something similar might be said about Miranda Devine. ‘For celebrated poet Dorothy Hewett,’ she explains, ‘Marxist ideology was so strong it obliterated a mother’s protective instinct and led to her offering up her young daughters for sex.’ For what it’s worth, by the 1970s, Hewett had long since broken with ‘Marxist ideology’, in part because the Stalinist doctrinaires of the Communist Party disapproved of the philosophical commitment to ‘free love’ she’d embraced well before she became a socialist. Hewett’s memoir Wild Card explains all of this in great detail. Devine, however, draws on other sources. ‘[Hewett] appears alongside Reich,’ she tells us, ‘in Wikipedia’s compendium of Marxist writers.’ Well, case closed, Sherlock. ‘Sex was a political act,’ Devine continues, ‘[Hewett] called herself a feminist but she was brainwashed into a cult that gave men unfettered sex without the family – responsibilities civilised society had painstakingly created over eons.’ Again, Hewett adopted her unconventional ideas about sexual freedom at university in Perth in the 1940s. Again, that’s documented in her memoir – although perhaps Wikipedia says something else. Devine’s point, of course, is to associate the left as a whole with the goings-on in the Hewett household. The Lilley revelations, she says, ‘blow [..] the lid on the Devil’s Decade, the 1970s in Australia’. She’s not alone in drawing a connection between abuse and the so-called sexual revolution.

In the Spectator, Mark Power, a clergyman associated with the Cornerstone Presbyterian Church, tells us that ‘Hewett’s radical feminism—who championed female empowerment through sexual liberation—was integral in orchestrating the abuse of her own children’. In the Guardian, Brigid Delaney ponders her own past enthusiasm for Bob Ellis, before citing a character in Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal for whom the sixties were ‘that explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression.’ You can see how this might seem persuasive, given how the predatory figures circling the Hewett household used a rhetoric of sexual freedom to justify their depredations.

‘I used to have sex with men to prevent them having sex with Rosie,’ Kate Lilley told Rosemary Neil of the Australian, ‘and then I would find out they did have sex with Rosie. I think because Mum was this figure of ¬sexual licence, we were particular targets.’ No-one should pretend such behaviour was anything other than vile. At the same time, it’s important to recognise just how much of the conceptual apparatus we now possess to understand sexual abuse owes to the liberation struggles that Devine, Power and co so loathe. Most obviously, the modern notion of consent emerged from a women’s movement that fought bitterly against male entitlement to female sexuality. Until 1994, there were, still places in Australia in which a man could legally force a woman to have sex with him, if they happened to be married. Moreover, during the struggle to ban rape in marriage, conservative politicians and churchmen did all they could to oppose any reform, with, for instance, the Festival of Light arguing that a requirement for matrimonial consent would deal the traditional family ‘a crushing blow’.

Women’s liberation coincided with the sexual revolution because, in Australia, throughout most of the twentieth century, the law made open discussion of contraception, abortion and sexual health more or less impossible. In Queensland in 1971, for example, police arrested an activist from Women’s Liberation for distributing a pamphlet entitled ‘Female sexuality and education’, with a member of parliament thereafter declaring the document ‘so obscene, so lewd and such an outrage of modesty as to make a hardened whore blush.’ Yes, some men exploited the new openness about sexual matters to force women (or other men) into sex that they didn’t want. But the general tenor of the liberation struggles stressed the importance of the oppressed’s self-determination, which, in the women’s movement, led to slogans like, ‘women have the right to control their own bodies.’ To put it another way: if men transformed sexual freedom into sexual coercion, the problem was not that sexual liberation had gone too far, but rather that it hadn’t gone far enough. Think, for instance, about the activist determination of that time to educate children about their bodies and their rights. In NSW, the Vice Squad raided bookshops to prevent the distribution of The Little Red School Book, a pamphlet that, as Nicole Moore explains, contained ‘explicit information about heterosexual sex, homosexuality, petting, contraception, masturbation and abortion, much of the text using slang and four-letter words, in an effort to speak directly to its audience.’ The response to that book illustrated the political divide.

Bob Santamaria, the intellectual godfather of the Catholic right, supported the ban, declaring that The Little Red School Book was ‘not even suitable for adults with weak stomachs’. By contrast, liberationists like Wendy Bacon risked jail to distribute the pamphlet, insisting to the press that ‘school kids should have rights’. In 1973, the Victorian teachers union went on strike on behalf of Helen Garner, who’d been sacked for an article in which she described giving teenagers a frank class in sexual education. The title of that piece – ‘Why does the women have all the pain, Miss?’ – speaks volumes about how sexual ignorance made sexual abuse more likely. If you don’t know how your body works or if you’re ashamed about your anatomy or desires, you’re infinitely less likely to seek help if you’re being threatened or abused. Similarly, if you don’t understand that you have rights and if you’re not confident to speak up against figures in authority, you’re easy prey to an abuser. After all, the vast majority of sexual violence takes place in the family, with the perpetrators generally known to the victim. That’s why the empowerment of children matters so much. The academic Suzanne Ost thus quotes an officer from the British sexual-abuse squad. We go to an awful lot of trouble and have done over the years [to say] ‘Don’t go with strangers, don’t take sweets.’ However what we don’t say is, ‘Don’t do what the babysitter tells you when they tell you to go and do this. ‘Don’t do what your uncle says when he tells you to do this.’ What we tell them is ‘Do everything the babysitter tells you to do.’ ‘Be good for your uncle.’ The more kids feel they have some agency, the safer they’re going to be. Now, it’s generally difficult to settle political arguments in any scientific manner, simply because propositions in the humanities aren’t usually testable. This issue, however, is different. If, for instance, we wanted to judge the validity of the suggestion that the movements of the seventies rendered children more liable to be abused, we’d need a counterfactual. We’d want to examine a community in which feminism had made little progress, in which traditional notions of sexual chastity prevailed, sexual education wasn’t available, men ruled over women, and children were seen and not heard. Fortunately (or, more exactly, unfortunately) we have one. It’s called the Catholic Church.

For Devine, the seventies might have been ‘the Devil’s decade’ but you only need the most cursory glance at the royal commission into institutional abuse in Australia to realise that Old Nick was most active precisely where the reforms associated with feminism and the sexual revolution hadn’t been carried through. Not surprisingly, in an intensely patriarchal environment in which many kids believed sex to be dirty and wrong, priests could get away with abuse for years, with their victims blaming themselves for what took place. ‘Children,’ say the recommendations of the commission, ‘[should] participate in decisions affecting them [and be] taken seriously.’ That’s pretty much what Wendy Bacon was threatened with jail for saying in the early seventies. Again, none of this provides Bob Ellis and co with an alibi.

A number of pundits have suggested that progressive writers tolerated Ellis’ proclivities because of a romantic attachment to the idea of the debauched artist and that’s why the Lilley revelations haven’t been a bigger scandal on the left. I don’t think that’s true. I think that the muted response reflects that Ellis simply didn’t mean that much to people under 40, precisely because his rumpled, boozy larrikinism seemed so foreign to a generation that couldn’t imagine a prime minister like Bob Hawke. In any case, as I’ve been arguing on social media, the toleration for Ellis’ boorishness pertained more to his perceived proximity to power (he made TV specials with Les Murray; he knew every Labor leader, etc.) than to any widespread admiration for his bohemianism. But that’s another argument, one about recapturing the scepticism of authority that marked the seventies.

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* Sunday, 24 June 2018, The Sunday Project, Network Ten. Fiona West and Lisa Wilkinson. Television interview with Kate and Rozanna Lilley.

Daughters of Dorothy Hewett speak out about childhood of ‘sexual peril’

The adult daughters of late Australian playwright and poet Dorothy Hewett have spoken out about the predatory sexual behaviour they allege occurred in their mother’s home when they were children. Rozanna and Kate Lilley detailed their unorthodox upbringing in a candid interview with Lisa Wilkinson that aired on The Sunday Project. The Australian reported earlier this month that the sisters allege they were forced into sex aged 15 by men including the late writer Bob Ellis and artist Martin Sharp.

“I had the sense that we were in sexual peril from the time I was 12. It shouldn’t have happened … I think we were just sitting ducks,” Kate told Wilkinson on The Sunday Project. The sisters said there were other men from their childhood they could name — including one who is still alive — but they were afraid to do so. “I’m scared — already in just this last week we’re just in this maelstrom and one of our brothers has disowned us, particularly me, and it’s frightening; the whole thing is frightening,” Kate said.

Dorothy Hewett was in her early 50s when she moved to Sydney from Perth in the 70s with second husband Merv Lilley and Rozanna, then 11 and Kate, 13. Their Woollahra home was a beacon for artists and writers, with a “free love” atmosphere that extended to the young sisters. “It was classically bohemian, so people would be up all night. There were people staying in the house constantly. You never know who you’d find sleeping around in different bits of the house. Occasionally there’d be fist fights, but more often drunk screaming matches,” said Kate. She said that her parents “didn’t have an idea that children should be separated or have a special kind of life or attention … they thought we should just be in the mix. “I think mum’s idea was, once you hit puberty you were sexually in the world and you were kind of fair game.”

By the time the sisters were both 16 — the legal age of consent — they had both had multiple sexual encounters. Rozanna remembered it as a confusing time. “There were some people that I had things to do with that I don’t remember in a bad way, and then there were other people who were very predatory and did very explicitly groom me in an obvious way. I feel quite hateful towards those people, so I have a range of emotions about that particular time,” she told Wilkinson.

Kate was 15 when she had consensual sex with a man in his 30s. Soon after, she says she was sexually assaulted by another and then raped by another older man. “That was the worst moment of my life. Mum had a relationship with him so I think she didn’t want to know about this from me because I guess possibly she was already interested in him,” Kate recalled. The sisters confirmed the man was still alive. “He knows who he is and he knows we’re speaking about him at the moment,” said Rozanna.

The sisters allege they were both preyed upon by writer Bob Ellis, who passed away two years ago — Kate at 15, Rozanna at 14. “I was going to school one morning and mum and dad were asleep. He called me from the guest bedroom: ‘Come here child, come here child.’ He just grabbed my hand and shoved his hand down his pants … and then he walked me to school.” Rose said she and her sister had found it “very tiring” going public with their allegations but that “every time you tell it, you feel a little bit less ashamed.”

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Commentary: The case of Martin Sharp

On 9 June 2018 The Australian published interviews with Kate and Rozanna Lilley, daughters of the well-known Australian author Dorothy Hewett and her writer husband Merv Lilley. The interviews referred to the daughters’ underage sexual encounters will older men during the 1970s, naming the deceased writer and political commentator Bob Ellis (1942-2016), artist Martin Sharp (1942-2013) and visiting British photographer David Hamilton (1933-2016). Those males still living who were involved in sexual activity with the girls were not named. In the wake of the international #MeToo movement and Australia’s own Royal Commission into the Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse, there was an understandable heightened reaction to the revelations. Despite the complex narrative presented by the Lilley women in their original statements, some media reports concentrated on the more salacious elements, proclaiming (inaccurately) the presence of an ‘Australian arts pedophile ring’ and placing blame. A reading of the statements revealed elements of the contemporary context and, more importantly, the subsequent struggle of the women to come to terms with the trauma suffered as a result of the predatory and abusive behaviours they encountered in their youth.

An interesting element of the revelations is the detail concerning the encounter between Rozanna Lilley and Martin Sharp. This appeared to be a simple case of predatory behaviour on the part of the older artist, with the end result being ongoing trauma for Lilley. However, there were additional elements revealed of the initial intimate encounter, subsequent engagement between the two and its impact on both. Martin Sharp was born in 1942; Rozanna Lilley in 1962. According to Lilley they had sex one time when she was 15. From the early 1960s through to their meeting around 1977, Sharp led a less than secluded lifestyle. He came of age in liberating environments of Sydney and London, enjoying the bohemian lifestyle of an artist, with the support of a relatively wealthy family. His experiences with women were numerous, especially whilst resident in The Pheasantry in London between 1966-8 and, later, at the Yellow House in Sydney during the early 1970s. It is well known that Sharp liked women, and had a preference throughout his life for younger women. Prior to the Lilley revelations this was generally believed to be of those in their early twenties and older. As such, the instance of sex with the underage, 15 year old Rozanna Lilley, was greeted with howls of “paedophile” upon its revelation in June 2018. This term was rejected by Lilley herself, and for reasons she outlined in her various interviews. In the original Australian interview she noted that, of Sharp, "I had a terrible crush on him," but he did not reciprocate her feelings. Upon his death in December 2013 she penned the poem Mickey Mouse Romance which was published in the Melbourne Age newspaper the following month. This autobiographical piece reads as follows:

Standing on the long drive Imelda snapping at your heels I’ve returned I’d like to see the bedroom upstairs but it feels impolite Your mansion is crumbling Obsessively layering paint as though time has no conclusion There’s nothing to eat / Back then you peeled my boots, reverently Decades between us I was limp, sheets crumpled with dappled sunlight and despair / Paraded at parties Exhibited to Tiny Tim A collector’s piece / I stole loose change [from] ....

This comment suggests that Lilley’s friendship with Sharp was on-going, and involved visits to his expansive house Wirian, located in Bellevue Hill not far from her own inner city home in Wahroonga, near King’s Cross. In a television interview with her sister Kate late in June 2018, Rozanna said the following of her relationship with Sharp:

We had a friendship and we had sex once. That’s what happened between us two. I was about 15. I thought he was the ultimate romantic artist, and I actually did hope that that was a relationship that would continue. But he said that he wasn’t interested in having a relationship.

In light of this, it seems that Lilley may have encountered Sharp initially at her family house and one of her mother’s parties there, or even in regards to her theatre and playwright activities. Subsequent to this she visited him at Wirian in nearby Bellevue Hill, and it was here that they had their initial sexual encounter, judging by the comments in her poem around wanting to revisit his bedroom. At that early point – perhaps around 1978 - she was seeking to establish an ongoing relationship with the artist, but Sharp indicated that he did not want this. Shortly thereafter he was traumatised by the Luna Park fire of 1979 and the aforementioned references by Lilley to elements of darkness and the devil in his conversation would have perhaps occurred after that tragic event. The visit to Wirian by Lilley in “her late 40s” would have been early in the 2000s, by which point Sharp was in his sixties. He had become religious in later life, and this may have spurred on his phone call to her and apology for his previous actions. We can only guess at the thoughts of the two parties, for all we have are the recent words of Rozanna Lilley and the historic record of Sharp’s life and his adherence to a boyish Peter Pan nature which saw him cling to ideals of young female beauty. This may explain, in part, his behaviour as a 34 year old man in engaging in sex with a 15 year old girl. This took place at a period in time when such behaviour was not condoned. Likewise, the depth of the related trauma for such a young girl - even if the sex was 'consensual' - was little understood. The story of Rozanna and Martin is more common than one realises, with few such encounters ever made public. When they are, there is usually ongoing trauma and a plethora of emotions which time does not necessarily heal or resolve.

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The abuse of Kate & Rozanna Lilley | Pandora's Cross 1978

Last updated: 14 June 2023

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"Come here, child" - the sexual abuse of Kate and Rozanna Lilley

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An original play by Dorothy Hewitt 1978