Pages:
204
Original
date of publication: 1959
My
edition: 1987 (Virago)
Why
I decided to read: All Virago/All August
How
I acquired my copy: Philadelphia Book Trader, August 2010
Set
in Sydney, Australia, in the late 1950s, Bobbin Up is actually a collection of vignettes about the young women who work in the Jumbuck spinning mills. They are,
as the cliché goes, overworked and underpaid, and each “chapter” focuses on the
story of a different girl, among them a pregnant teenager and a Communist
idealist. The title’s double entendre is cunning—the bobbins of spinning, as
well as the idealistic acting of “bobbing up” out of one’s own circumstances,
to do something about an unfavorable situation (hence the title of the pamphlet
that’s passed around at the mill).
There
is a kind of idealism to the tone of the book, as well as an interest
in the “human condition.” The author wrote the preface for the Virago edition
of the book, in which she is a little bit embarrassed by her naiveté at the
time of writing. Dorothy Hewett was an unmarried woman much like some of the
women in the book, but like many she was laid off from work for being married
(she was the sole financial support for her children and their father).
She
explores the irony of her situation through detailing the tribulations of the
girls in this book and the political implications of their actions. Hewett went
and asked for a job in “the worst mill in Sydney” and began working for the
Communist party. Later on, while researching material for the novel, she took
walks through some of Sydney’s worst neighborhoods—the kinds of places in which
Shirl, Nell, Patty, Beryl, Beth, and the others would have lived. The detailed
stories of the girls’ everyday lives seem unrelated at first, but they are
related to a much larger social and political construct.
The
novel is littered with pop references; Sputnik is on the horizon; the text is
sprinkled with the lyrics from popular songs of the late 1950s. Even the
neighborhoods the characters live in are time-specific. It shows that not only
do the events of the characters’ beliefs but that they’re also a product of the
time period. But sometimes things don’t change. Compare this novel with the
likes of The Roaring Nineties, another Australian novel that focuses on the
working class. They take place 60 years apart, and in different parts of the
country, but they still deal with the same topics and concerns.
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