Introduction
As a Cuban-born American who has never visited Australia and knows next to nothing about Australian history or culture, I should be the least likely person concerned about the legacy of the Australian author Dorothy Ida Cottrell. But it so happened that, by chance or fate, I came to know Dorothy quite well. She and her husband Walter Mackenzie, or Mac, as everybody called him, were neighbors of ours when they resided in Homestead, Florida, in the 1950’s, and though I was only 12 at the time, I harbor many fond memories of that extraordinary woman confined since age 5, a polio victim, to a wheelchair.
Mac was our local Boy Scout Master, Troop 14, or “foreen,” as he pronounced it in his Scottish brogue. Of the scouts in the troop I was—or maybe flatter myself into thinking that I was—Dorothy’s favorite. I had recently emigrated from Cuba to live with an uncle. My father had been killed in an automobile accident, and I was still hurting over his death, and could barely speak English. So maybe Dorothy felt sorry for me. Or maybe I reminded her of some kid she had met in a Cuban port, a character study for one of her stories. She and Mac used to do a lot of sailing in the Caribbean and no doubt had anchored in Cuba at one time or another. Whatever the reason, Dorothy took a liking to me, and I to her.
On weekends and sometimes after school, I would drop by to help her in her flower garden, an array of potted plants set on racks at wheelchair level. The digging, pruning and tilling she could easily do by herself. Though physically on the small side, from years of wheel-chairing about under her own power, her hands had become extraordinarily strong. The tightest lids on jars and stubborn screwdriver jobs posed no problem for her. My assistance in the garden consisted merely of lifting and moving things she couldn’t reach. And as we worked, she would regale me, non-stop, with wildlife anecdotes replete with imitations of animal sounds, and not just regular barks, mews, baas and moos, but the more subtle warbles, chirps, whines, cackles, grunts, gurgles and slurps as well. Once a dove fluttered out from beneath a bush, and as I watched the dove take flight, another dove fluttered behind me. I turned around, and it was Dorothy, mimicking the trill of the flutter perfectly, and much amused by the surprised look on my face. At age 10 she had earned the reputation in her native Queensland as the best mimic of the Australian wild dog, the dingo, howl. She once did the howl for me, an eerie half moan half shriek. Seemed that my youthful company brought out the girl in that jolly 50-year-old lady in a wheelchair.
Loving but not sentimental, kind but not maudlin, tough but not hard, curious but not prying, loquacious but not glib—the Aristotelian Golden Mean between extremes. That was the Dorothy Cottrell I knew up close.
I recall one day when she was meeting at her home with some bigwig editor or publisher from New York that I dropped by to deliver a rattlesnake skin wallet I had made for her. Rather than ask me to come back later, she insisted that I join them, and so for half an hour we three sat there, the famous author, the bigwig guy from New York and rustic 12-year-old me delivering a lecture in halting English on how to remove and cure rattlesnakes skins. If the chest of memorabilia Dorothy kept in her room still exits, I wager that my rattlesnake wallet is still in it.
Another Dorothy anecdote: Every couple of weeks Mac would take us scouts on weekend “survival” excursions into the Everglades wilderness, just a few miles west of Homestead, where we would live off the land, with no gear other than machetes, knives, a first aid kit, a coil of rope, and a flint-and-steel or a friction set to build our fires. Sometimes after these excursions the troop would hold a special meeting in the living room of the Cottrell home. On hearing our rambling and highly embellished accounts of our survival experiences among the alligators, vipers and mosquitoes of the Everglades, Dorothy’s face would light up and her usual animated voice wax all the more animated. Had she been able to manage the terrain in her wheelchair, she would have gone with us on the next excursion.
It was at one of these troop meetings that she taught us the iconic Australian song, ‘Waltzing Matilda.’ In those days, before the advent of a TV set in every home, story telling and singing were a popular form of parlor entertainment. We American kids, of course, had no clue what a swagman or a billabong was, nor had ever seen or heard of a coolibah tree, but the song’s catchy tune caught our musical fancy, and we incorporated into our campfire repertoire. When we came to the line “Down came the troopers, one, two, three,” we would stomp our feet, shouting out the numbers. In addition to her other talents, Dorothy had a fine singing voice. An alto, if I recall.
But that was Dorothy Cottrell the person. Dorothy Cottrell, the gifted painter and writer, I discovered years later, after her death in 1957, at the relatively young age of 55. Polio victims tend to have a short lifespan. I was serving in the Navy at the time and didn’t know that she had died. Mac had meanwhile returned to Australia, leaving no forwarding address and their old three-story house where we sometimes held our scout meetings, had burned to the ground. Hopefully, her files, paintings, sketches and chest of memorabilia were saved from the flames. To this day I do not know where Dorothy is buried, whether her body was cremated, or if an obituary was ever written or a memorial service held in her honor.
Early in her life she had decided that she would not feel offended if people pitied her. That was only natural. “I expect people to fell sorry that I can’t walk. I would be all-fired shocked if they weren’t sorry. To be a little sorry for our fellow mortals is, I think, the base of Christianity and all successful human relations. ‘Pride’ is another overworked word in the lexicon of bosh. People like to help. So let them!. Anyone who wants to sweep my house, step right up!“ (‘How to Wear a Wheel Chair,’ The Saturday Evening Post, June 10, 1950.)
So, maybe, for much the same reason, when she saw the Grim Reaper approaching she instructed her heirs to dispense with the usual postmortem rituals and publicity. If friends wanted to mourn her in private, so be it. But, knowing her, I suspect that did she not want to be remembered as a dead person. She'd want to go on living in the memories of the living as the creative, venturesome woman she had always been.
Sadly, the works of Dorothy Cottrell today are hardly remembered, much less read, in her native Australia. One reason given is that most her works were written and published in America. True, Dorothy and Mac left Australia early on and eventually became American citizens, to avoid, as she put it, the “iniquitous” taxes imposed on her earnings by the Australian government. Still, the themes and settings of many of her works whose first or later editions were published in America— The Singing Gold, 1929; Tharlane, 1930; Wilderness Orphan, 1936; “The Pit in the Jungle,” 1951; “The Gantlet of Flames,” 1952; to name some—were set in Australia. She even confused Florida alligators with Australian crocodiles. The notion that writers who leave their homeland and publish abroad automatically morph into foreigners is not always true. The history of literature abounds with expatriates who remained true to their native culture.
But to me it seems that the main reason for the low esteem in which Dorothy Cottrell is held among modern-day scholars and fiction readers in Australia, as is the case with comparable authors in America, is that she was too pristine, too robust and, worse yet, too successful commercially. Unlike the tortured writers so revered nowadays in university literature departments (no disrespect intended for such writers or for literature departments) Dorothy Cottrell had no emotional issues to nurse, no grievances to trumpet, no social or political agendas to advance, and no self-pity to wallow in, though as a life-long polio victim she certainly had good reason to be bitter. In all the five years that I knew her I never, not once, saw her angry or depressed, and though by then in failing health and in chronic pain from a back injury, her mood was ever “jolly,” her favorite word, and her laughter came easy and was contagious.
Dorothy Cottrell the writer, to be sure, had her flaws. Some of her romantic subplots and happy endings bordered on the implausible. But, then, wasn’t that also the case with Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and other greats who, like Dorothy, churned out serial novels on contract in newspapers and magazines for the general public? Dorothy herself admitted that she could have written more and better had she been able to sit long enough to ponder what she wrote. But she couldn’t. Whether she was overcompensating for her handicap or simply afflicted with an irrepressible wanderlust, she wasn’t sure. All she knew, and accepted, was that she had to be moving as much as her handicap would allow--sailing, rowing, swimming, gardening, driving, traveling somewhere. So for her, careful deliberation was out of the question. And as she grew older, her wanderlust and disinclination to mull over her writing increased in direct proportion, as is evident by the fast, unrelenting, almost frenetic action of her 1950’s stories in contrast with the relatively measured pace of her earlier works. The reverse of most writers, Dorothy accelerated with age. The words, sentences and paragraphs for her later works would jell in her head while on the move, then, back home in her room, she would put them down on paper to be mailed, with virtually no editing, to her publisher. Then it was off to her next jaunt, and on the next, until her lease on life ran out and the vast unknown lay before her, as befell the wife of one of her characters.
”What would you like for our honeymoon, Margaret?” And she had laughed and answered: “To ride! Always when one rides one has to go home. This time let us keep riding, let us go north and north and north, across the hills and across the plains and onto the Gulf grass and on to the north! When night comes let us stop, knowing that in the morning we will go on again, until we reach the sea!” (‘The Gantlet of Flames,’ The Saturday Evening Post, October. 11, 1952.)
Start reading any of her later works and you are at once drawn into a vertiginous world of storms, fires, hunts, people frantically running about, laboring for days on end to the point of exhaustion, animals fleeing, seeking shelter, protecting their young, all living things eking out a primeval survival in jungles, deserts, swamps, harsh grass lands and treacherous waters. But, in the end, things always work out somehow. Lovers held apart come together, simple-minded folk make up in natural wisdom what they lack in educated intelligence, animals are saved by their unerring instincts, self-important fools are embarrassed, the good guys win, and the egregiously evil ones get their comeuppance.
Admittedly, most urban readers nowadays would have trouble identifying with Dorothy’s close-to-nature characters. How many, after all, have any trudged through a mosquito-infested West Indies mangrove marsh, got drenched in the torrential rains of the Great Barrier Reefs, lived off the land in a deserted island, drove herds of sheep hundreds of miles over sum-baked plains, or ventured with scant protection into the Australian Outland? Still, I’m convinced that many readers, not only in Australia but throughout the English-speaking world, would greatly esteem Dorothy's works if only they knew that the works existed. The more discerning ones would be particularly enthralled by the masterful way she employed splashes of color—_before she turned to writing she had been an accomplished painter--in her depiction of human emotions, moods and social relations. The timeless themes of classic literature are all evident in Dorothy’s works, expressed not with subtle verbal discourse, but communicated at the gut level through raw, ceaseless action and vivid visual imagery.
”Eight hundred feet below me the mists were just breaking up from the purple valley floors; shreds of finely ascending gold and tendernest pink, quivering, stirring banks of silver, parting to reveal deep blue and purple of fathomless shadow; ruby touching the peaked wall of the northern mountains; and to the east the hill-waves running on an on to meet the sun. A great noiseless drama of colour.” (The Singing Gold, Houghton Mifflin,1929. Page 71)
The story of the Cottrell's old house in Homestead itself reads like a work of fiction. Local lore had it that a murder-suicide had once taken place on the third floor, and that officials who had gone inside to inspect the place had seen ghosts descending the staircase. Though there were no records of a murder suicide or of town officials seeing ghosts, the story held, and for years the old "haunted" house remained vacant, until the Cottrells bought it.
The Cottrell haunted house certainly looked the part. Unlike your typical Florida one-story, low slung cinder block dwellings, so built to minimize the impact of hurricane winds, and pastel painted to blend in with the semi-tropical flora, the Cottrells house was an unpainted three-story gabled wooden structure, something right of Victorian New England or a Hollywood horror film. It had been built by a wealthy northerner, a Mr. Gossman, in 1900 The fact that the post-and-beam frame and siding had withstood many a hurricane and had not succumbed to rot or termite damage, built as it was with a Dade pine, a cypress-like wood, added to the house’s aura of mystery.. The house sat on the corner of Tennessee Road and Coconut Palm drive, atop a slight knoll, some thirty yards from either road. Diagonally across the front of the property generations of kids walking or biking to and from Redland school had over time trodden a shortcut path connecting the two roads. Mac not only kept the path open but the its surface clear of rocks and snake-concealing weeds.
The Atlantic southeast region of Florida, from Fort Lauderdale to Key West, Homestead included, is today one unbroken chain of housing developments, motels housing and shopping centers. But in the 1950’s Homestead and the surrounding area was a sparsely populated agricultural community. My family's house was about half a mile up from the Cottrells' on Tennessee Road. Between our house and theirs was another house. On the other side of the road, the only inhabited house was a mile away. So we weren’t exactly next-door neighbors. From the Cottrell house, the town of Homestead proper was five miles south, and Miami, twenty five miles north. A few miles to the West was the Everglades wilderness, where Mac used to take us camping.
The climate in our corner of the world no doubt reminded Dorothy and Mac of their native Queensland. The relative latitude of Homestead, 25 N, being approximately the same as that of Toowoomba, Australia (27 S) where the young Dorothy went to live with her grandmother, and the family ranch in Ularunda, Australia (26 S) where she spent much of her teen-age years and met Mac. And the similarities between the West Indian islands where they often went sailing and the Great Barrier Reefs of eastern Australia are nearly identical. The flora described in the largely autobiographical The Singing Gold --orange groves, coconut, almond and mango trees--was pretty much the same as that of our South Florida; and though we had no kangaroos, dingoes, cockatoos, or black swans, there were plenty of deer, small panthers, raccoons, opossums, and many species of birds—herons, flamingos, cranes, and, reptiles galore. We also had our version of “swagmen,” itinerant farm laborers, mainly from Mexico, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, who’d come to harvest the winter crop and were housed in a barrack-like community called Redland Camp. The Cottrells were quite at home in Homestead, Florida.
But why would they buy the only three-story house for miles around instead of the standard one-story dwelling when Dorothy was bound to a wheelchair, that, they never told me. Maybe the rumors that the house was haunted, that they would acquire two resident ghosts in the bargain, appealed to their imagination. All I know is that Mac. a jack of all trades, fixed up the house, cleared the brush around it, and made it livable for Dorothy by erecting an ingenious hand pulley elevator on the south side of the house so she could negotiate the three floors from her wheel chair. A mere 20 lb. pull on a rope could hoist a 200 lb. load.
When I joined Mac’s troop, the haunted house looked more like a bed and breakfast inn. Outside, just off the elevator, on the south side of the house, Dorothy had her garden. And inside, when she wasn’t writing, she was cooking, baking, canning. We scouts, though, couldn’t shake the ghost myth. When the troop met in the living room, we couldn’t help but steal glances up the stairs, expecting to see a ghost descending at any moment. The fibbers among us, of which there were more than a few, would swear years later that they did see ghosts.
While cruising the Internet in search of information on Dorothy Cottrell, I was advised that I write up my recollections of her; but then, on second thought, I decided to go one better and create this blog. Writers and story-tellers in all cultures since time immemorial have employed pretty much the same literary devices—-metaphors, similes, images, symbols, plots and subplots, etc—-but only the gifted few are possessed of that special something that keeps the whole together and makes it ring true. The not-so-good ones usually end up with an impressive heap of unconnected strands. Dorothy Cottrell was one of the gifted few. For all her flaws as a facile, popular writer, everything she wrote, individually and collective, holds together and rings true. My youthful recollections of Dorothy the person might not be entirely accurate, but her works, undeniably, speak for themselves. “But genius rises above faults. Mrs. Cottrell writes Australia as it has never been written before.”(Mary Gilmore, Sydney Morning Herald, Oct. 27, 1928.)
So what do I hope to accomplish with this blog on Dorothy Cottrell? Simply, to rekindle an interest in her. Casting a great writer like her into oblivion merely because she does not conform to the latest literary fads would be a huge loss, a shame, really. Perhaps the parties that hold the copyrights (The Saturday Evening Pos, Argosy, The Ladies Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, Houghton Mifflin) will consider new editions of her novels or collections of short stories. Perhaps some graduate student will undertake a thesis, or an English literature professor a scholarly article on her life and works. Perhaps some movie producer will find it profitable to film one her stories, as was done in 1936 and 1959 with Wilderness Orphan and The Silent Reefs, respectively. To my knowledge, neither film has been copied to DVDs, probably because the celluloid originals were ruined, but their scripts should still be filed away somewhere. Then there’s the inspirational story of Dorothy Cottrell herself, as a film, TV documentary, or book. How she took the sour lemon that life dealt her and made a sweet lemonade out of it is a story begging to be told.
I purposely leave this blog unfinished that I may enlarge upon it as I jog my memory and garner more information. By way of introducing browsers to Dorothy Cottrell, I have excerpted from her novels and stories a number of passages, many more than required to make my point, and loosely organized according to topic. As I said, I am no expert on Australian literature or culture, nor do I claim to be a professional scholar or a literary critic. So I cannot presume to have the last word on Dorothy Cottrell. Anyone familiar with Dorothy or her works should feel free to join in.
Bibliography
"Not Without Introductions!", Liberty Mar 19 1932
"The Actress Next Door," Liberty, Apr 2 1932
"The Best Laid Plans," Ladies Home Journal, Apr 1932
"Judith Runs Out of Gas," Liberty, Apr 9 1932
"The Square Peg," Cosmopolitan, Apr 1933
"Racing Abe Goes Home," The American Magazine, Jul 1935
"Wilderness Orphan," Cosmopolitan, Jul 1935
"I Hear You Calling Me," Liberty, Jul 3 1937
"That Dog Spike," Cosmopolitan, Jun 1938
"Where's That Dog Spike?" Tales by Australians, 1939.
"Little Fellow," Cosmopolitan,Sep 1940
"By Courage, Through Danger," Argosy(UK), Apr 1945
"To Blow Away," Argosy (UK) Aug 1946
"Attested Miracle," Argosy (UK), Sep 1946
"My Love Will Come," The Saturday Evening Post Feb 7, Feb 14, Feb 2, 1948
"Hurricane, North Atlantic," The Saturday Evening Post, May 24 1947
"The Reef," Argosy (UK) July 1947
"Tiddlywinks and the Train Wreckers," Golden Book of Dog Stories, 1947
"Hurricane, North Atlantic," The Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1947.
"Dove of Peace," Woman's Journal, Apr 1949
"Hurricane," Argosy (UK), Feb 1950
"Hurricane Wedding," The Saturday Evening Post, Mar 11 1950
"How to Wear a Wheelchair," (article)The Saturday Evening Post, Jun 10 1950
"Shark Bait," Argosy (UK), Jan 1951
"Of That Early World," Argosy (UK), Feb 1951
"The Pit in the Jungle," The Saturday Evening Post, Aug 18 1951
"Rain Forest," Argosy (UK), Nov 1951
"The Gauntlet of Flames," The Saturday Evening Post, Oct 11 1952
"The Secret of the Purple Reefs," The Saturday Evening Post, Dec 6, Dec 27 1952, Jan 10, Jan 24 1953
"Gauntlet of Flame," Argosy (UK), May 1953
"The Mysterious Box," The Saturday Evening Post, Jun 26 1954
"Spanish Gold," Argosy UK), Mar 1955
The Singing Gold , 1924
The Singing Cloud, 1929
Earth Battle (Tharlane, 1930
Winks-His Book, 1932
Wilderness Orphan, 1936
The Silent Reefs, 1954
Biography
Cottrell, Ida Dorothy Ottley (1902-1957), writer, was born on 16 July 1902 at Picton, New South Wales, daughter of Australian-born parents Walter Barwon Wilkinson, mine manager, and his wife Ida Constance, née Fletcher. Her parents moved to Ballarat, Victoria, where, aged 5, Dorothy contracted infantile paralysis and was thereafter confined to a wheelchair. When her parents separated she was brought up by her grandmother at Picton and later at Toowoomba, Queensland, and on her Fletcher uncles' stations, Elmina, near Charleville, and Ularunda, near Morven, where she trained sheep and cattle dogs to draw her wheelchair. She was taught at home by governesses until about 1915, then she lived with her aunt Lavinia Fletcher in Sydney, where she was taught by Theo Cowan and attended Dattilo Rubbo's classes at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales, becoming a competent black and white artist.
In 1920 Dorothy went to live at Ularunda; she had 'the sportsman's ardour for hunting' and became an excellent shot. She also swam, rowed and soon learned to drive a car. With dark hair and 'luminous brown eyes', she was a stimulating companion. On 23 May 1922 at the Ann Street Presbyterian Church, Brisbane, she married Walter Mackenzie Cottrell, bookkeeper at Ularunda, where they returned without disclosing the marriage. In February 1923, taking 'two dogs, a large quantity of bulbs and some 11 cwt of Dossie's belongings', they 'eloped' to Dunk Island where they lived with the beach-comber Edmund Banfield. Later that year they went to Sydney, living for a time at the People's Palace, and Dorothy sold cartoons to several magazines. In 1924 they travelled round New South Wales in a truck, selling odds and ends. In the winter they returned to Ularunda and Dorothy started to write fiction.
She sent a manuscript to the American Ladies' Home Journal, which bought the serial rights for $5000 in April 1927. It later appeared in the Sydney Mail and the English Women's Journal. Published in Boston and London in 1929 as The Singing Gold, it achieved great success in Australia, Britain and the United States of America. It was largely autobiographical: in the Sydney Morning Herald, 27 October 1928, (Dame) Mary Gilmore wrote: 'But genius rises above faults. Mrs. Cottrell writes Australia as it has never been written before'.
To avoid 'iniquitous taxation' on her American earnings, the Cottrells sailed for California on 19 October 1928. In 1930 she published Earth Battle (Tharlane, in America), depicting the struggle to wrest a living from the outback. One critic wrote that few Australian novelists 'have drawn a more gripping picture of [the country's] barbaric beauty and its terror'. They led a vagabond life in America and took out American citizenship in 1939; from 1942 they lived in Florida. Dorothy became a successful journalist and wrote short stories, mainly on Australian themes, for magazines. She also published two children's books: one was filmed, Wilderness Orphan (Sydney, 1936), about a pet kangaroo. In the early 1940s a serious back injury interrupted her writing.
Dorothy loved the small West Indian islands 'that still grow Elizabethan flowers and whose people use words that ceased to be part of normal English three centuries ago'. In 1953 she published The Silent Reefs (New York), a mystery adventure story set in the Caribbean: it was serialized in The Saturday Evening Post and made into a film in 1959. She confessed that she might have written more had she not been so deeply imbued with wanderlust. With an adventurous spirit and 'resolute recklessness', she would board any boat that would take her wheelchair. She once returned to Florida in a 24 ft (7.3 m) ketch. She also loved gardening.
In 1954 the Cottrells came back to Queensland to manage Ularunda until 1956 when they returned to Homestead, Florida, where Dorothy died of heart disease on 29 June 1957. She was survived by her husband and an adopted son.
Author: Barbara Ross, Martha Rutledge
Print Publication Details: Barbara Ross, Martha Rutledge, 'Cottrell, Ida Dorothy Ottley (1902 - 1957)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 8, Melbourne University Press, 1981, p. 121.
The Young Artist
Dorothy Cottrell sketcher, cartoonist and novelist, was the daughter of Ida Wilkinson, née Fletcher, who separated from her husband soon after Dorothy's birth. When Dorothy contracted polio in 1908 her mother was unable to look after her, so 'Dossie' (her family nickname) lived in Sydney with her aunt Lavinia Fletcher and her grandmother Mary Ann Fletcher. Despite extensive medical treatment she spent all her life in a wheelchair. In her teens she joined her mother and her Uncle Ernest on the Fletcher brothers' properties at Elmina, near Wyandra, and at Ularunda, near Morven, in southwest Queensland.
Dossie returned to Sydney in 1917-18 in order to attend art classes at the Royal Art Society of NSW [RAS] under Dattilo Rubbo and James R. Jackson. In 1918 she won the RAS scholarship; the male nude drawings with which she won the competition are in the National Library of Australia [NLA] (Pictorial collection). Her unpublished novel 'Wheel-Rhyme' contains a description of 'Signor' Rubbo's nude life class attended by students of both sexes. A drawing of Lavinia Fletcher, done when Dossie was attending the RAS classes, is also in the NLA. The classes ended and Dorothy Wilkinson returned to Elmina in 1919. In 1922, still under age, she secretly married the young station bookkeeper, Walter Mackenzie Cottrell. Eight months later, their marriage still unconfessed, they 'eloped' to Dunk Island. Dorothy had been obsessed with the place ever since reading The Confessions of a Beachcomber by naturalist E.H. Banfield at the age of ten and had corresponded with its author for years. Initially Banfield refused them a home on his island, but he finally relented and invited them to come and stay with him and his wife for six months. They arrived with 'all their goods and chattels' at the beginning of February 1923. Banfield died 4 months later, on 2 June, and the Cottrells moved to Sydney. They lived in the Salvation Army People's Palace until Walter eventually found a job selling real estate.
After her elopement Dorothy earned a little money drawing cartoons. Her only known extant original (Mitchell Library *D457, #32) is a coarse, unfunny 'bushie' gag, Prime Bacon, sent from Dunk Island, published in the Bulletin on 19 July 1923: [two farmers talking] '"That old sick cow o' mine got down last night and the damn Pigs ate 'er."/ "Well. You'll be able to sell some real dairy fed Pork for once in your life".'
In mid-1924 'all was forgiven' and the Cottrells returned to Ularunda. Dorothy turned from selling her drawings to writing novels but continued to draw for pleasure. Her c.1925 pencil portrait of W. Pallett, the stock overseer at Ularunda, is in the library of the University of Florida at Gainesville. Her 1924 novel The Singing Gold, based on her stay on Dunk Island, was immediately accepted by the American Ladies Home Journal then published in book form by Houghton & Mifflin in the US and by Hodder & Stoughton in England. Between 1924 and 1927 she produced four novels. Because of taxation problems for an Australian writing for the American market the Cottrells decided to move to the USA; they reached Los Angeles at the end of 1928. In 1939 Dorothy became an American citizen. She and Walter revisited Australia in 1954 to see her elderly and fragile mother, but Dorothy was in continuous pain and soon returned to Florida for treatment. She died there on 29 June 1957. After her death Walter Cottrell returned to Bowen; he remained in Queensland until his death on 27 July 1991. --Joan Kerr.
Her Art Work
"Red Earth Country," Elmina, 1919
"Drawings," 1915-1919 -- One album (66 drawings) : pencil, charcoal, pastels ; 62 x 50.5 cm. or smaller. Notes From the Dorothy Cottrell manuscript collection, MS6085. R9747. National Library of Australia.
Reference Key
The Singing Gold—Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1929. (Gold)
Earth Battle – Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1932 (Battle) – Published in the U.S. as Tharlane.
Wilderness Orphan – Julian Messner, 1936, 1940 (Orphan)
The Silent Reefs – William Morrow, New York, 1952 (Reefs)
”Hurricane, North Atlantic,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 24, 1947.
”My Love Will Come,” The Saturday Evening Post, February 2, 7, 14, 1948.
”The Pit in the Jungle,” The Saturday Evening Post, August 18, 1951.
”The Gantlet of Flames,” The Saturday Evening Post, October 11, 1952.
”The Mysterious Box,” The Saturday Evening Post, June 26, 1952.
”The Best Laid Plans,” The Ladies Home Journal, April, 1932
”How to Wear a Wheelchair,” (autobiographical article) The Saturday Evening Post, June 10. 1950.
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