Republished for a new generation of readers, this extraordinary autobiography traces the personal and political metamorphoses of Dorothy Hewett's first thirty-five years. After university, several failed love affairs, an attempted suicide and a major poetry prize, Dorothy Hewett joined the Australian Communist party in 1945. Four years later she left her husband and moved to Redfern, Sydney with her lover, a boilermaker. A woman who challenged sexual and political conventions, Hewett combined the passions of her life with her power as a writer to create this classic of people, place and political history.