More than 40 years later, shortly after the November 1975 Dismissal, Hewitt wrote that she had followed her star pupil's career "with the admiration of an ordinary Australian for a very great Australian". Whitlam had impressed her as a student too, Hewitt judging one of his poems winner in a literary competition for which she donated prizes of ten shillings and sixpence.

A country girl, Hewitt was 21 when she came to Canberra as a newly qualified teacher in 1930. In 1938 she opened her bookshop, Verity Hewitt's, which for decades was a favourite haunt of Canberra readers. Lord Gowrie, Governor-General during World War II, reportedly called it "the nicest little bookshop in Australia".

In later years she ran a commercial orchard where Narrabundah College now stands and then a cattle stud on a small farm near Queanbeyan and in rough country south of Captains Flat. She learned the Russian language, and taught English at the Soviet Embassy to, among others, Evdokia Petrov.

As an activist, she was involved in the 1950s peace movement, Vietnam War protests, and the Australia-USSR Society. As an historian, her PhD project saw her travelling alone in 1966, at the age of 57, to far corners of Afghanistan.

Her fascinating account of that adventure, A Nice Quiet Tourist, has just been published – at the same time as a biography, Verity. This draws on her prolific writings from youth to old age, including large numbers of letters to her future husband, the historian Laurie Fitzhardinge, in the Depression years 1930 to 1933.

Hewitt loved life in the bush capital – not least hiking expeditions and horse rides in, as she put it, "so beautiful a country as the Canberra country". This edited extract is derived mainly from letters she wrote to Laurie in 1930.

On Sunday morning 15 June Hewitt took her usual 25-minute walk across the paddocks to St John's church, Reid, rather than join the crowd, estimated at 2500, that gathered at Duntroon to witness the 11.30 arrival of Amy Johnson, on tour after her epic solo flight from Britain. She was amused to hear the Rector, Canon Charles Robertson, deliver a "violent speech from the pulpit against Mr Scullin [the Prime Minister], Miss Johnson, the spectators and anyone else concerned in seeing her in church hours". Hewitt exaggerated when she told Fitzhardinge the congregation's protest at this violation of the Sabbath, "passed on to poor Mr Scullin", appeared "blazoning" the front page of the next day's Canberra Times; there was a brief item headed "An Insult".

In the September school holidays she visited Young (where she had taught briefly before being posted to Canberra). Instead of making the circuitous rail journey via Goulburn, she travelled by "mail car" to Yass and then train to Young. Her account of the journey on the "lonely and rough bush road" to Yass begins with the driver, Miss Donn, informing her that she carried "the most important mail in the Commonwealth", the Canberra to Melbourne mail, on her nightly run. Miss Donn was glad of Hewitt's company, and as it was a moonlit night and the road, although full of potholes, was dry and so not slippery, she could "talk without interruption, by which I profited considerably".

She is weather-beaten and active with short clipped grey hair, nut-cracker jaws, jet black eyebrows and wild-looking eyes, and her conversation was in keeping with her person - she talked at random about all sorts of topics - Aboriginal names, the Gippsland Lakes, the bravery of the blackfellows in the war, trees ... anecdotes of her trips across ...

At Yass station, waiting for her train beside a "roaring coal fire" in the early hours, Hewitt got into conversation with the night officer, who, "like an increasing number of people", was "agin the government in any of its present shapes or forms". She commented that Australian politics was likely to be "quite interesting in the next few years", with strong feelings for State secession on the one hand and unification on the other providing "plenty of fuel for quite a nice little bonfire".

By now, nearly a year after the October 1929 Wall Street crash, Australia - with the rest of the Western world - was in the midst of the Great Depression. The national unemployment rate had more than doubled to 21 percent, and the Scullin Labor government, swept to power two weeks before the crash, was in crisis.

In Canberra, with building projects suspended the workers' camps bore the brunt of the unemployment. Relief schemes instituted included construction of the city's first swimming pool at Manuka; Hewitt reported a moonlit walk with a group from Brassey House in July 1930 to see the excavations and the "ungainly machines for crushing earth and mixing concrete and so on, mostly built in Aurora, Illinois". The same month she helped at a meal provided by St John's parishioners at a camp housing a hundred unemployed men, and noted admiringly their resilience in the face of "long dreary days fossicking for driftwood about the river or else trying to get work from or sell artificial flowers which they have made in their grim hours of leisure to Mrs Civil Servant".

She was alarmed at growing hostility to Canberra - Canberra bashing. She told Fitzhardinge in August she considered this "utterly wrong and due to the work of selfish and shameless people (politicians to wit)", and was writing a response to a particularly nasty recent article in The Bulletin. Two months later she described a daydream she had had during a Sunday sermon: she would "buy up" The Canberra Times and "infuse its lifeless pages with strong All-Australian unification"notions. Employing journalists "with the eloquence of Edmund Burke and the gall of Mr Penton [Brian Penton, who wrote satirical political commentary for the Sydney Morning Herald]", it would become "the central organ of the whole continent", eventually winning the hearts of all. Then all the politicians of all States would "come voluntarily to Canberra in sad procession with all their red tape, halos, sealing-wax and other insignia of their office to lay it down on the front steps of the Federal Parliament or to make a bonfire on the top of Mt Ainslie".

Walking home from Civic with friends on a warm evening the following February, she overtook the New South Wales premier, Jack Lang, and other delegates to the premiers' conference then in session, out "strolling like ourselves". This pleasant image belied the atmosphere at the conference, with the firebrand Lang in bitter disagreement with Scullin and the other premiers. The following November, Lang's supporters in Federal Parliament split the Labor vote, bringing down the Scullin government. Despite her working-class sympathies, Hewitt had no regrets when the state governor, Sir Philip Game, dismissed Lang on 13 May 1932; it was "joyful news", she told Fitzhardinge.

Verity: A Remarkable Woman's Journey by Robert Lehane and A Nice Quiet Tourist: Letters from a Journey to Afghanistan by Verity Fitzhardinge. Both published by Australian Scholarly Publishing. On November 25 at 2pm in The Graduate Lounge, University House, ANU. Chrissy Grishin will launch Verity, a biography by Robert Lehane, and Amin Saikal will launch A Nice Quiet Tourist, Fitzhardinge's account of her travels through Afghanistan in the 1960s. RSVP: aspic@ozemail.com.au.