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.