Dorothy Hewett and the Terror of the First Trimester

Biographies of Dorothy Hewett (1923–2002) usually include a short section like this: ‘In 1944 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies and had a son who died of leukemia at age three. The marriage ended in divorce in 1948, following Hewett’s departure to Sydney to live with Les Flood, a boilermaker, with whom she had three sons over five years.’ That was from Wikipedia. It’s just a few sentences, a handful of facts notable for many reasons, working backwards: the quick succession of births, the shift from a middle-class marriage into a working-class one, the death of a child. He was her first child, named Clancy after the Aboriginal activist Clancy McKenna. Clancy, the child, was born in Perth and died tragically in Melbourne in 1950. The thing that snippet from Wikipedia doesn’t make clear—that few biographies explore further than the bare facts—is that when Hewett left Davies, she left Clancy too. His sickness and death came the following year.

The silences in stories have always fascinated me. An empty space in a biography seems to contain more compelling questions than the information surrounding it. Clancy’s death is omitted altogether in the briefer biographies.