Bobbin Up (VMC) - Tapa blanda

You could never be lonely . , . always conscious of the myriad lives woven and interwoven with your own, breathing, battling, loving, fighting, suffering in the stifling summer dusk It is the late 1950s and the Russians launch the first Sputnik. A group of women sweat in the Jumbuck Woollen Mills in Sydney for breadline wages. The whistle blows grime is washed from faces, hair combed, lipstick applied and the workers emerge, women again, leaving the factory behind them. Out into the evening streets, flashing neon lights and the journey home to families and lovers. Among them are Shirl, nineteen and four months pregnant; Dawnie, beautiful and fiercely chaste; Patty, singing in the dance halls; and Nell, an active Communist Party member. These women have their own dreams: but a common spirit binds them, and with Nell as their leader they will come together for the fight which lies ahead . . . Dorothy Hewett, one of Australia s most famous playwrights, was born in Perth in 1923 and lives in Sydney. This her only novel, never before published in Britain, has been out of print for over twenty years and is soon to be a major film. First published in 1959, Bobbin Up is one of the most important portraits of working-class life in Australia. But more, it is an honest and colourful account of the lives and loves of ordinary women and their men.