‘With Complexity.’ So answered Kate Lilley upon being asked by Channel 10’s Lisa Wilkinson, ‘How do you hope your mother will be remembered?’ It seems a grounded and poignant response, given the abuse Kate and her sister Rozanna experienced as teenagers in the household of their parents Dorothy Hewett and Merv Lilley.

Since the breaking interview with The Weekend Australian in June in which the sisters described how their mother encouraged sex with much older male visitors, Kate and Rozanna have received mixed reactions. From groups within the literary community, who apparently fear the besmirching of Hewett’s name and see the behaviour as normalised within its 1970s libertarian milieu, the sisters have met with discouragement and anger. Most of these critics have remained anonymous to the public. One man wrote to Kate, claiming that Hewett had asked him at a conference: ‘Don’t you want to f**k my daughters?’ He replied, ‘I’m not interested in f**king children,’ to which Hewett responded, ‘You’re the only one around here that isn’t’. The same man went on to advise Kate against continuing to tell her story, warning, ‘Dorothy’s reputation as a writer may be harmed’ and ‘this would be our loss’. Those happy to go on the record have blamed Hewett’s Marxist sympathies, ‘feminism gone wild’, the idolatry of ‘the artist’ and the amorality of the art world in general for what the Lilley sisters endured. Of the overall response, Kate said to Wilkinson, ‘I’m scared—already in just this last week we’re just in this maelstrom and one of our brothers has disowned us, particularly me, and it’s frightening; the whole thing is frightening’.