vulgar press working class publishing

Dorothy was born in 1923 in Perth, Western Australia, was brought up on an isolated sheep and wheat farm, educated by correspondence and later at Perth College and the University of Western Australia. She worked as a journalist on the Perth Daily News and the Communist Party newspaper The Workers' Star. Shifting to Sydney, she worked for one year as a mill hand and for two years as an advertising copywriter, then, back in Perth, for nine years as an English tutor at the University of Western Australia.

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

Bobbin Up was first published by the left-wing cooperative, The Australasian Book Society, translated into five European languages and republished in English by Seven Seas Books (Berlin) and the feminist publishers Virago. Since that time she has published thirteen plays, nine poetry collections, an autobiography and a further two novels.

Her twenty-three-year membership of the Communist Party of Australia ended when the Russians marched into Czechoslovakia in 1968.

She was awarded an AM for services to Australian literature, a D.Litt. from the University of Western Australia, and a lifetime Emeritus Grant from the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts.

She spent her last years in the Blue Mountains outside Sydney with her husband, the writer Merv Lilley. She died on the 25th of August 2002.