Mum’s men used us for under-age sex, say Dorothy Hewett’s daughters

Dorothy Hewett was so “f..ked up” that she encouraged and facilitated her daughters’ early sexualisation, they say.

The late playwright, poet and mother of six Dorothy Hewett
with her daughters Kate, left, and Rozanna Lilley in about
1976-77.

When Dorothy Hewett died in 2002, glowing obituaries ­described the playwright, poet and mother of six as a “warm and ­formidable” friend and an ­“untamed earth mother’’.

Hewett’s adult daughters, ­Rozanna Lilley and Kate Lilley, have some jarringly different memories — especially when it comes to the radical sexual mores of the 1970s bohemian arts scene in which their mother was ­immersed.

In extraordinarily frank interviews, the daughters have told The Weekend Australian that Hewett was so “damaged”, “f..ked up”, and lacking in “moral boundaries” that she “encouraged” and “facilitated” their early sexualisation within that predatory scene.

Kate, a respected poet and an associate professor of English at Sydney University, said that ­during the 1970s, the family’s terrace home in Sydney’s east was “unbearable’’ and “as an acquaintance says — like a brothel without payment”.

“There were constantly men staying in the house and hardly any (heterosexual) man came to the house who didn’t try to have sex with one or more of us (Kate, Rozanna or Dorothy),’’ Kate ­revealed.

She alleged that a visiting poet who raped her when she was 15, went on to have relationships with her mother and sister. She told her mother about the alleged rape but “she didn’t believe me’’.

Kate and Rozanna also alleged that — among a long list of male artists who assaulted, exploited or had under-age sex with them — were celebrated writer and film ­director Bob Ellis; leading pop artist Martin Sharp and British erotic photographer David Hamilton. These men are dead — Hamilton committed suicide in 2016 following child-rape allegations — but the sisters said other artists who abused them were still alive and working.

Rozanna, an author and academic researcher, said her mother was known as a “female Don Juan” and “would often say that the greatest thing in life was sex’’. From adolescence onwards, she and her sister “became quite keen to get involved with all of this, because that is what she encouraged us to do’’.

By the time the sisters turned 16, the legal age of consent, Kate had slept with six men and Rozanna with “at least a dozen’’.

Kate Lilley, left, and Rozanna in Sydney’s Paddington. Picture: John Feder

In a remarkable coincidence, the sisters have written about these scarring experiences in new, strikingly different books: Kate’s poetry collection Tilt, refers to the under-age sex, a sexual assault by a film producer and the rape by the poet that she allegedly endured. Rozanna’s book, Do Oysters Get Bored? is a “hybrid” of essays and poems that document her “carelessly broken girlhood’’ and her current life as the devoted mother of an autistic son.

Tom Flood, a Miles Franklin literary award winner and the women’s half-brother, said his mother “believed in children’s rights’’ and that “covered a wide range’’. He mostly lived in Western Australia in the 1970s, but “I knew there’d been quite a bit of under-age (sexual) stuff involving (his sisters and) quite a few ­people, some of whom are quite respected’’.

He added that while his mother “put them (his sisters) into that milieu … I would sheet home any blame to the men involved. They were the times, and men were taking advantage of it.’’ He also revealed that the poet who allegedly raped Kate, later forced anal sex on his mother during their ­affair. This had “shocked’’ her.

“She didn’t call that rape — I did,’’ he said.

Kate claimed she had consensual sex with Ellis four times when she was 15 and 16. Rozanna said that when she was 14, Ellis “shoved my hands down the front of his trousers”. She said she had sex with Sharp — then the country’s leading pop artist — when she was 15.

At 14, she met Hamilton at a Sydney hotel for what she assumed would be a modelling shoot. Instead, he took topless shots of her before “he took photographs of my vagina — close-ups’’.

The younger Lilley daughter had previously appeared naked in a feature film. At 13, she performed nude and in a sex scene in the “schlock’’, pseudo-feminist movie, Journey Among Women, which her mother co-wrote.

Tabloid newspaper the Sunday Mirror reported the scandal, revealing how Rozanna had become so drunk while filming a scene involving alcohol, “she collapsed in a stupor’’. Her father, ­author Merv Lilley, “threatened to withdraw her from the movie’’.

Rozanna told the newspaper “going naked didn’t worry me’’. Today, she sees that role — which included a “ridiculous” lesbian ­affair with an adult — as exploitative. She says of her mother’s involvement: “She had a lot of fantasies about herself that she enacted through her daughters.’’

Photographer Juno Gemes, who was a friend of Hewett, insisted that she was “a glorious feminist’’. She wanted her daughters to have access to the highest echelons of the literary world.

“I am really shocked that they’re casting their mother like this … I think she would be devastated by these allegations,” Gemes said.

Rozanna, who has told her story to a closed session of the royal commission into child abuse, said her mother “genuinely believed she was offering this unfettered, uninhibited lifestyle to us’’.

Kate said her early sexual experiences had been “a source of tremendous distress and pain’’ that continued for decades.