Six of the poems were political from the point of view of women or children, several expressing hope for a new life for her baby daughter Kate Lilley (52,65).
One of Lilley’s most memorable songs was about the wreck of the SS Birchgrove Park in 1956, the last real shipwreck in the Sydney area:[8] O beckoning lights of Sydney town Still beckoning men as the ship goes down It is for the love of your winking lights That colliers drown on lonely nights The title poem (2) and the major ballad (3) lead off the book with a call for self-determination and better treatment for Aboriginal people.
Both authors express similar themes - solidarity with: the Communist Party, Katanga, Cuba, South Africa and the nuclear disarmament movement, “The Pick-up Shed” is credited in the book to Hewett and in songbooks to Lilley.
Hewett had left a wealthy Western Australian farming and shop-keeping family to join the proletariat, while Lilley was a knockabout Queensland character who had worked at various manual jobs, including canecutter, stoker, and wool presser.
[10] By the age of 23, Hewett had won two national poetry prizes, but she discontinued writing in 1946 to focus on activism and child-rearing.
[12] He also published seven poems and four short stories between 1955 and 1961 in the literary magazines Overland, Realist Writer and Westerly,[5] mostly about rural work.
At the end of 1961, just prior to setting off on a caravan trip from Perth to Rockhampton with four children, Lilley and Hewett gestetnered about a hundred copies of What About the People!
[13] The book proved popular, and in 1962 Frank Hardy of the National Realist Writers Council decided to publish it.
[15] Hal Colebatch, a right-wing activist but a friend of Hewett and Lilley, considered their verse was “shot through with lines different and superior to the run of party-line versifying of the day”.
[16] Gilman (2014) saw the book as a classic call to action, formulated on the basic principles of Soviet socialist realism: the spirit of the people and the party.