Four young Australian factory workers, Shirl, Dawnie, Patty, and Nell, a Communist Party member, band together to face their problems.

Dorothy Hewett was a left-wing Australian journalist in the 1950s. She originally wrote Chapter 15 of Bobbin Up as a short story, and in 1958 added fourteen chapters to develop a rich set of characters, and followed Chapter 15 with a single chapter of denouement. The result is a moving portrayal of women working in Australia’s woolen mills, enduring long hours and poor conditions in the struggle to support their families. Many of these women were very young — teenagers, mostly — and living in poverty, but dreaming of a better standard of living.

Hewett modelled Bobbin Up and its characters on her own experience. Hewett arrived in Sidney in 1949 and became involved in the Communist Party. She asked for a job in the worst factory in Sydney,” and was put to work in the Alexandria Spinning Mills. She spent a year there