Hewett's writing could have emerged only from that rich past. It is erudite, elegantly literary, but also playful in the way that she moves easily from one hemisphere to the other: the spotted gums, for instance, in the enchanted forest landscape of southern New South Wales smoothly replace the primeval forest which is the location of Tess's seduction, and the dunes replace the Egdon Heath of Eustacia Vye's restless wandering. This fluid playing with reference, however, has an ironic edge which characterizes that fresh vision. Jessica is not seduced under the spotted gums, and the letter which clears up a mystery at the heart of Neap Tide falls out from the leaves of an old twenties popular paperback, 'like a scene from a Thomas Hardy novel.'

It is this playfulness which needs to be taken into account when reading Neap Tide. There are plenty of clues which can point towards a Gothic reading, both specific ('it's like some incredible Gothic tale') and allusive (the various isolated houses, each with its own secret; the living dead or the dead living; secrecy; fluid identities; malevolent forces). In each case, however, the novel defies such easy categorizing. This is summed up towards the end as Jessica rides out of town and is waylaid by the old Aboriginal woman with the glass eye who jumps out at the car to confer a benediction on the departing Jessica. This quasi-Chorus or Tiresias character ultimately though serves no symbolic function. She is merely a con woman who takes out her glass eye to get money from the tourists, and appears in the rear vision mirror cackling happily as she waves her glass eye around so that 'its many facets shimmered in the light.' Allowing the Gothic to overwhelm the reading of this novel deflects attention from the various ways it transcends genre labelling. Romantic assumptions are continually deflated and nothing turns out to be quite what it appears. As Nicole Moore pointed out in her overland review when the novel first appeared, Jessica's resistance to romantic poetry (and to the male poets who people the novel) takes the form of an absorption in those popular paperbacks which she finds in the rented house on the cliff and the possibility of a new academic study of popular reading. Another authorial joke? One might think so if you go by the quotation on the back of the Penguin edition from Brenda Walker who seems to have been completely taken in by the game (whether it's from a full review or is just a pre-publication puff I'm not sure): 'A spectacular novel of romance from the dangerous edges of the land and the sea.' But this novel is by no means an upmarket Mills and Boon.

Games and playful ironies aside, Neap Tide has a serious purpose in its subversion of the clichés associated with the romantic artist figure, 'The artist as hell-raiser and romantic rebel. He'd had no background, you see, no real place or family. It was as if he'd invented himself from nothing, a phenomenon sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus.' The settlement of Zane has all the romantic isolation the artist might desire for creation, but it is a place of false hopes, of rape and murder, of death and desertion, and, most importantly, of wrong readings where the drowned woman is really only 'a poor bloody seal.' The only piece of writing to emerge from Zane is by the ex-con Lenny, The Zane Journal, meant to be a book of 'wise thoughts about the environment' but which is 'nothing but chatter' according to its author. Lenny is still, however, the town's archivist, keeper of secrets and honey man, and the Journal is the interpolated secondary text filling in vital details which undermine the romantic isolation of Zane, telling the town's stories and presenting a view of a mundane world which is sad, ordinary, and full of gossip and mistakes.

Hewett's understanding of the need to find that necessary wellspring for the writer, the 'real place,' takes many forms. She can be inspired by another writer's 'real place' as much as by the landscapes of her own past and imagination. It is the 'small clean enclosed space of filtered light,' the dreamspace of the self which is the central image of the autobiography and which reappears in 'The Darkling Sisters'; and it is the Nietszchean abyss which she mentions in 'Homeland.' Place is at the heart of all the thirteen stories of A Baker's Dozen, written and sometimes rewritten over a period of forty years. They explore the landscape of experience and imagination, recording as they do so a significant and turbulent period in Australian history, the second half of the twentieth century. There are bush stories and city stories, political stories and tales of solitary individuals.

In her introduction Hewett asserts that there is 'an unmistakable uniformity of style, thought and feeling which helps to bind these tales together into a roughly coherent whole.' Contributing to that uniformity is the continuing sense of writerly joy in a hybrid cultural heritage in which echoes both enrich and disconcert the reader. Reading 'Joe Anchor's Rock,' for instance, I am haunted by the presence of Joyce's 'The Dead,' heat for snow, Jarrabin for Galway (and is it only coincidence that Rachel is exiled from her homeland of Mangamaunu where Henry Lawson spent so many unhappy months?). Dislocation is actual and psychological for both character and reader.

The sexual ironies of Neap Tide are anticipated in 'On the Terrace' with its deliberate undercutting of the Lawrentian mating game: Tim who 'wanted the symbol of the earth-mother, without the brutal reality,' and who uses terms like 'poetess' and 'Jewess,' is ultimately 'a little man, looking somehow diminished in the late afternoon sunlight, and she was free and sad and sorry for him, with enough insight to wonder how much of it was sour grapes.' For a while there we all wanted to wear coloured stockings like Gudrun, because it seemed that Lawrence almost had it right about women - until Kate Millett told us otherwise. But here's Hewett writing ten years before Millett, mimicking Lawrence in her character's 'strident maleness' and wryly wondering at the end if it's all just sour grapes, seeing through the Lawrentian clichés as she will do later in Neap Tide when Lenny allows his fox to escape at the end of his Journal.

So many stories, so many years, so much lived life. In her latest collection of poetry, Halfway up the Mountain,* Hewett expresses almost an obsession with her place in a long, long tradition of poetry making. These are poems of old age in which the infirm body bears no relation to the vigour and continuing richness of the imagination, 'I never ran so fast as I do now' ('The Runner'), recalling Yeats and his likening of the body in old age to a tin can tied to a dog's tail, whereas 'never had I eye and ear more fantastical' than now, as he says in 'The Tower.' John Kinsella writes of these poems in his introduction as an archaeological dig: of geographies, relationships, language, and personae. It is through the medium of the poem that Hewett has recaptured that archaeologically 'perfect memory' of 'Signposts', in a language that is as taut and dazzling as the wheel of stars that encompasses and marks all childhood memory. And beneath that wheel of stars are the places, people and a literary heritage which she has recorded in her geography of place and time in this New World, grasping Fuentes's mythic chance in a language which shows no sign of diminishing in its intensity and power.

Barbara Garlick taught for many years in the English Department at the University of Queensland where she is now a Research Associate. In another life, she and Dorothy Hewett were both copywriters at Waltons-Sears in Sydney extolling the pleasures of 'filmy nights' (swami nightgowns).

* Reviewed by Marilla North in our last issue.