Book Tip: The Dyehouse and Other Australian Text Classics

by Bettina Deda | Oct 12, 2016 | Books, Events, Things I love | 0 comments

The Dyehouse is a book about the daily life of the working class in postwar Australia “when work was being radically transformed by new industrial technologies.” The author, who was born in 1905, was member of the Communist Party and later on the Labour Party and ended up working in a textile factory herself. As Fiona McFarlane points out in her introduction “Calthorpe was expected to protect the interests of the Company at all times; but, like Miss Merton, her sympathies lay with the workers. She began to take notes, thinking, ‘Oh well, while I’m preparing to write my great Australian novel, I’ll write this.’”