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

Dunk Island

"Red Earth Country," Elmina, 1919

"Old Washhouse," Elmina, 1919

"Ularunda Cookhouse," 1920

"Portrait of a Man," 1920

"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.

Her Painter's Prose

I bring up Dorothy the painter because many of the descriptions in her novels and stories—of nature, people and animals—read like paintings. Check out the art work in the previous section and compare it with the following passages. Dabs of color, hues, light, shadows, outlines, perspective--the handiwork of the visual artist is everywhere evident in her prose. (For full references, see “Reference Key”)

“Yellow, yellow, yellow, a great shout of color between the hard blue sky and the red dust.” (Gold, p. 19)

“The little snowy flower that comes out snowy white and then gradually changes through all shades of pink to the deepest ruby red. And the water took enticing turns around large red stones, on which the blue and scarlet dragon flies sunned, and was bordered by the softest toe tickliest ribbon of purple-reeded couch grass, while the refracted sunlight made changing amber patters on the red gravel bottom.” (Gold, p. 34)

”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.” (Gold, p. 71)

”There were clear green shallows blotched with purple, and reefs smeared in herring and pink, ad a sea of glasslike silver. And a little chalk-white beach, that at its northern end was pressed and overlapped by the glistening jungle, brilliant, living enameled with sunlight. (Gold, p.166)

”Sunlight flickered through the grey-blue, pointed gum leaves, and patterned the white satin of the new bark, and the reflected sun flashed up under surfaces of the gum trunks and branches. The faint new greens of the herbage and the yellow water through which the sun rays sank were all very lovely; but there was nothing to be seen as lovely as Georgina herself, fishing for yabbies on the old dull-red rock!” (Battle, p. 20)

”As he rode, the sunlight left the earth, and a faint gray-purple bloom veiled its red, while, as though for compensation, the treetops caught a stronger glow of the west. Then they too faded and grew dark against the wine-red sky.” (Battle p. 41).

”Then the grey shadow swallowed up the world, while the water among the pale grass clumps became blood-red, and the overarching sky and amber-wine that deepened to rub-fire along the west . and then the swams came, their dark plumage crimsomed by the last light, and then, as they dropped through the shadow-line, turning to velvet black against the south sky, where far-away purple clouds were banking. (Battle, p. 66)

“The big moon poked up through the dead trees at the head of the backwash of Tom Henton’s Dam; its golden face reflected in the still waters. The moon was immense, dramatic, and as it rose the landscape took on pale colors, grey and silver, lilac and faint green; a splendid, silver shining that paled the stars. (Orphan, p. 9)

“The sunset was at incredible distance, holding a wild quality of withdrawal, as if the light of the world seen for the last time.” (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’)

”The heat was suddenly too great, the sun too bright and near. The normal Caribbean sky of violent blue, with clouds so low that they seemed to brush the masts of ships, lifted suddenly to a sky of high, neat cirrus that blazed like a forge at sunset.” (Ibid)

”Morning in the secret channel was a thing of Elfin green and gray and lilac, jeweled with the ruby colors that touched the fallen and floating mangrove leaves that made the only sharp distinctions between the worlds of air and water.” (‘My Love Will Come’)

”The last of evening was on the channel marker and slashed as amber search-lights between the intertwined keys [small islands], so that where the keys caught the level light they seemed fashioned of burnished metal, and where the keys were in shadows the mangrove leaves reflected the second-hand gold of the domed storm clouds. The stillness was terrific.” (Ibid)

”Then the moon topped the swamps, so vast and golden bright that it seemed to melt a part of the horizon, and its face appeared round before it was fully above the world.” (Ibid)

”Even the great swells were crimsomed through their clearness, in which one saw the darting shadow of fish against the light.”(‘Hurricane Wedding’)

”And at first the grassy banks of the stream were open and trailed with maidenhair ferns on the rocks and tree trunks. Then the pink-fruited figs pressed closer and tree ferns made a roof of pale green fronds, and then the great tree trunks pressed in so that the stream was a winding aisle through a cathedral.” (‘The Pit in the Jungle’)

”Especially the birds that were like sparks of snow and white flowers, and yet somehow like wicked and merry gnomes bead-eyed expressive—crested, companionable yet unknowable. (Ibid)

Colorful scenery alone, however, does not necessarily translate into good literature. Fiction writers there are many who can paint beautiful pictures with words, but what few can do convincingly is blend the pictures with the other parts of their stories--characters, plot, theme, settings, narrative--so that it all comes across to the reader as one harmonious whole. I have just read, for example, a short stories by a 19th writer whose bucolic images of nature could stand alone as poems yet have nothing at all to do with the rest of the story. Perhaps because this writer was a life-long city dweller from a well-to-do family, who never experienced nature in the raw, her out-of-context images are like obtrusive obstacles that only force readers to skip over them so they can get on with the story. Such is not the case with Dorothy Cottrell. She not only experienced the full picture of the Australian Outback and the Caribbean first hand, and in a wheelchair no less, but she also knew how to paint it with brush and with words. Her imagery, her characters and all else in her story are one. The reader cannot skim over any of the parts without missing the whole story. That level of writing takes more than mere skill. It takes genius.

Pristine Nature

None of Dorothy’s novels and but a few of her stories take place in an urban setting. Her setting almost exclusive is nature, and not the idealized nature of 19th romanticists, but a raw, pristine nature that is neither friend or foe, good or evil, but a force that at once envelops and transcends humanity. In a sense, it can be said that nature itself is her main character. Which may be one reason why modern-day readers, urban dwellers nearly all, have trouble relating to Dorothy’s work. (For full references, see “Reference Key”)

“Much the same beautiful indifference of light falls on the land when it is sleekly silvern and flower-patterened with plenty, and upon a world shrunken with drought and the dry-rot of death.” (Gold, p. 286)

”The grey fluffy seed-heads, and grey rustling skeletons of each heat-slain flower and weed, as they bleached together among the dead herbage. But none gave me the thrill of the blossoming almond tree. It was not as other flowers; it was a shining miracle of perfectness. I lay beneath with meditative brown hands clasped against my little tummy, and in my own way I worshiped it, in its pink crinkled glory.” (Gold, p. 42)

”I rested my arms of a rusty bar of the old gate, a bar that had been above my head when I first stood there. In the Garden of Tomorrow the roses were still in blossom, and the feathery tops of the young cypresses swayed in the sunshine; beyond was the tree basin of the town; beyond that the heaving cultivated hills. And, far beyond them, across the open farmlands of the Darling Downs, and beyond the fleshy desolation of the pear country, far, far to the west, lay the mulga. [grassland]” (Gold, p. 107)

“It was very dark beneath the trees, and they dripped in a delightfully morbid manner, in fact they were ‘in tune’ with my mood, and all poets know how helpful that is.” (Gold, p. 93)

Joan’s grandmother’s death. Against the doctor’s orders, the ailing old woman sets out on a walk alone. “She was dead some hours later; tiny and frail, sitting watching the sunset paint the splendid hills.” (Gold, 117)

”I passed the oleander bushes still faintly showing their colours in the moonlight, on among flowering orange trees: dark greenery all corralled with white stars, scenting the hot, dry-blue night air, for, though the oleander smelled strongest under the sun, the night belonged to the orange flowers.” (Gold, p. 131)

”He had known men who toiled slowly under the blasting sun, with steady intensity of labour carving out the wherewithal of life from the sun sun-bitten grey of the world: slow toiling men on new fence lines, creeping across arid virgin lands; infinite sweating on the red face of new roads; patient working and following of slow stock, by men who gained at last something of their animal’s deliberation of thought and movement; slow suffering of hell-doomed working bullocks dragging plough and scoop through the powder-white clay of new tank sites; dragging with brute patience of pain on days when the iron draw-chains burnt as if drawn from fire, and the white mirage flickered across the burr-brown flats.” (Gold, p. 145)

”A live marred by much of human cruelty and meanness, vice, and slander born of monotony; and yet an impressively epic contest between patience and strength of man and the immense, indifferent cruelty of nature in her less domestic moods.” (Gold, p. 145)

”There was a glow of apricot coals in the grate, and on the cream mantel massed pink roses, and it might have been that the reflection of these touched my grandmother’s cheeks. She was dead some hours later; tiny and frail, sitting watching the sunset paint the splendid hills.” (Gold, p. 99, p.117)

”The lonely pageant of life was behind them, with its fruit blossom of youth, its storms, its agonies, its splendor or noon, and they were left for just a little while to chirrup in the sunset.” (Gold, p. 82)

” I have tried to picture a drama on which I have so often hear you comment--to set against the immensity and indifferent of nature the poignant and yet strangely passing lives of men . The one so vast, emotionless, cruel, lovely, and eternal; the others so quickly ended, whose suffering seems so needless and leaves so little trace, and yet which are in a way so much more than the march of days and nights that obliterates them.” (Battle, ‘Introduction,’ p. 5)

”Boastfulness, lasciviousness, cruelty slipped from him as he watched the low storm. He became part of life: savage and primitive--yet splendid with old conflict. Planning life's oldest battle: the contest with the earth. Noblest of battles surely, in that it must be waged so long as men would live: that it gave life not death.” (Battle, p. 17)

”The bleached plain closed in upon him. A world of faded grass and burr, where crickets sang. The heat of the earth was almost too great to bear, and yet, pulling his hat down so that it shaded his neck, he sprawled relaxed. Heat above—below: calling of crickets and dry whispering short grass all about. His cheeks burned to the living glow of the hot ground, withered sweet grass leaves touched his lips.” (Battle, p. 205)

”The hunter alertly moving and killing, and the eagles dropping out of the infinite heavens to devour the kills with which he had finished, seemed the only things awake and alert in the sunny bowl of the world. And all day as he hunted there stayed with him the foolish memory of little sounds in the darkness indicative of the infinite continuance of the joke.” (Battle, p.205)

“The Everglades were not a blue and running sea, but they too were a sea—of water and grass: limitless, sprawling, shining with light; each foot in their thousands of square miles rotting cleanly; growing passionately as they had from the morning of time.” (Reefs. p. 139)

”Anguish made him foolish. His hand exerted unconscious pressure upon the forward rim of his sand basin and a strong rivulet of white sand flowed down up the beach as the forward lip of the basin began to lower before his eyes.” (Reefs, p.166)

”What had taken it? Was it not a man but a thing that the birds had circled? Whatever it was, he was marooned with it under waking stars and falling night. Turning slowly, he looked about him. But there was only the pallor of the dunes and the leaden silver of the blowing salt grass and the great sound of the sea.” (Reefs, p.171)

“Repeatedly he rose to the full of his twenty-inch height and scolded the grey-and-black bowl of the earth and the cold whiteness of the now high-risen moon. The, feeling a little reassured, and because it is the nature of babies to sleep, he slept, holding tightly to the fur of his dead mother.” (Orphan, p.17)

“A storm that should not have developed had swung into the northern reaches of the great grass flats. The body of the fire was still miles away, but it was already a great fire and growing, so that while, as yet, no actual flame topped the horizon, no pulsating rose, no orange, told of furious burning.” (‘The Gantlet of Flames’)

”Suffering, he swam with all his strength with the current that still would not let him rise. His lungs cried for breath, and the normal world of sky and air seemed an unattainable heaven.” (‘The Mysterious Box.’)

”About him now the fantastic light lay in bars of flame between the great trunks, so that the dead leaves seemed coals of fire, and on the green leaves the light was blots of blood. (‘Hurricane Wedding’)

”As he emerged from the forest the wind caught him like a great pain. For old his strength and old Timothy's weight, he could not maintain contact with the earth, and reeled like a reed in the torrent of air.” (Ibid)

”The sweat of his rhythmically laboring chest glittered, as did the dark foliage drenched by the last wild flowers, while the harsh sound of his breathing held something of the still-restrained violence of the gusts that tossed the jungle roof to a roar of leaves and abruptly ceased.” (Ibid)

”The top spins even faster. Its whirling edges tear into the surface of the seal, tuning the sea to foam and the foam to mist and the mist to a great cry that is a scream that is thunder, and a thunder that passes the capacity of hearing, The sea rises before it, unable to fall back against the wind, and ever piling upon itself.” (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’)

”Men worked until there was pain in their hearts like a little fire that ran to and fro, and the trembling shook their bodies, and the legs were uncertain of their step. Men worked through the day, through the night, into the next day, into a blur of day and night, until their hands were raw, until it seemed they had no further strength to work; and yet they kept working.” (Ibid)

The Animal Lover

The more noble and morally admirable characters in Dorothy’s works, as a general rule, are animal lovers, while the depraved and evils ones are cruel toward animals. (For full references see “Reference Key”)

“All day long a million larks fluttered singing into the sunshine, and the little cruel hawks of the plains followed the traveling sheep and preyed upon the living sparks of music. Singing the larks rose, although they knew that the hawks were waiting for them, singing even as they fled from the talons of death.” [Hence the image for title of the novel] (Gold, p.19)

Joan Whatmore's father, Marcus, saves one of larks that sought refuge by flying inside his shirt: “He had carried the desperate beautiful atom there until the safety of darkness came; and, dear, rough, gentle old man that he was, even after thirty years I never saw him tell of it without tear-blurred eyes. It had been so frightened and so small and valiant, that it had flown not only into his shirt but his heart.” (Gold, p. 19-20)

Marcus laments the loss of a lamb kicked to death for no apparent reason by otherwise mild-mannered horses: “The next kick drove his head in, and when my father picked him up his little pink mouth was open, and blood running from his nostrils. The old man held him in his arms, and shook his fist after the playing horses, then he shook it at the sky and cursed all Heaven. But if it happened to be listening, I defy it to have minded. For it was not for the loss of the lamb that he swore, but because it had run so fast, and given such a little pleased bleat.” (Gold, p. 127)

Joan's closest friend through thick and thin was her 140 lb. pet mongrel dog, Tim, a gift from her future second husband: “Jerry had found him years before, a great clumsy puppy flogged into insensibility by his bullock-driving owner. And somehow Tim had never got used to being loved; it still overwhelmed him; caresses leaving him trembling from his great broad liver and white head to the end of his spotted tail.’ (Gold, p. 204)

When Joan gave birth to twins, Tim assumed the role of their guardian angel. “He rested his great grizzled head on the bunny blanket and looked at them long and earnestly, with his eyes that began to show the blurring of age. Then he wagged his tail with short thumps against the floor boards, and licked my cheek that he accepted our mutual responsibility. Thereafter he lay in the sun near the babies’ cot, and rumbled a little bit as he slept, just to show what he would do to any one who hurt them.” (Gold, p. 263)

Tim’s death: “I sat down near the old dog. His breathing grew easier at last, and he seemed to sleep for a while. Then he scrambled agitatedly to his feet, stumbled to me, and rested his head in my lap, whimpering. I shook his great shoulders and asked him what was the matter. He looked up at me with old bleared eyes, whined softly, tried to lick my hand, and then very swiftly he was dead.” (Gold, p. 290.)

Clippings, Joan's first husband, is killed while trying to save the victim of a traffic accident. Clipping's pet terrier, expecting that his master will soon come home, looks all over for him, but when he eventually realizes that his master will never return, he dies of grief: “He looked everywhere; in the fowl-yards and duck-houses, way down by the big sand hill, and even as far as the wool shed and drafting yards. and if a car came, or he heard strange voices, he was gone from my arms in a flash, galloping with the little gallop that heaved him up at one end and then at the other. It broke my heart to see him, and yet it was worse when finally he ceased to look. Then one morning, although his little whiskered body was still on his chain, we found that he had gone away--as I hoped, to find Clippings for whom he had looked so long on such stumpy legs. I wrapped him up in Clippings’s old neat coat.” (Gold, p. 264)

Donald the Shearer saves a dingo pup caught in the forked branch of a bush: “The mother runs away into the brush, an’ the other fat little chaps is gone like you breathed on a bunch o’ fallen wattle balls! The one ‘at was stuck gives a last little call, an’ then just looks at me waitin’ to be killed . I pull him out an’ dusts his pants an’ puts him in the log mouth, and then breaks off the bush ‘case he might do his divin’ act again . Then I rides on feelin’ good because I’d not killed none o’ the dingo family.” (Battle,. p. 16)

Donald the Shearer closest friend is his horse, Dan: “Why, sometimes if I’m feelin’ lonely a bit, rolled in me blankets with nothin’ but the grass around an’ the stars over—why, he knows! An’ he comes up, stepping gentle thorugh the grass, an’ by an’ by, if I be still, I feels him nubblin’ at the hair o’ me with his bit-o’-velvet nose . Oh, we been rovers, Dan an’ me! But we be still content, a-seeking the gold at the rainbow foot . I never felt kiss to match o’ his nose in me hair . I never seen the match o’ the sun on his hide!” (Battle, p. 34)

Sandy, a neglected child, shelters sick and defective animals in his make-believe farm (p. 52). And John Terchant, the "Little Man" sentenced 30 years to prison for allegedly attempting to kill and rob Old H.B worries about how his pet dog will fare without him. Reminiscent of Argos, Odyssus’ loyal dog, Terchant's pet sits at railroad station wating for his master to return, until shooed away. (Battle, p. 80)

Rancher Tom Henton and his wife adopt an orphaned baby kangaroo, name him Chut, after the chit-chit sound that Kangaroos make, and rear him as if their child. “He would come when the woman called him, and somersault neatly into her lap as she sat on the steps. There, lying on his back {baby kangaroos, joeys, naturally suckle upside down} he took his supper to the accompaniment of small kicks of pleasure.” (Orphan, p. 30)

The same hunters that had killed Chut's mother shelter and feed the little joey by fashioning a maternal pouch from the leg of old pair of trousers and a baby bottle from a rubber tube attached to a tin of milk. (p. 27) By age three Chut had grown into 7 ft., 300 lb. giant yet retained much his babyhood gentleness and innocence: “Tom Henton and his wife knew the big kangaroo as a creature of most docile tractability, with a touching, childish passion for bread and sugar; a giant who, given the chance, would still drink innocently from the baby’s bottle from which he had been fed as a joey!” (p. 50)

The Hentons also adopt Blue Baby and Zodie, two female baby kangaroos, who with Chut grow up playmates (Orphan, p. 34) Zodie later becomes Chut's mate and mother of his offspring. (p. 95) But Chut's innocence and trust of humans was not to last long. One day, when Henton was away on business, the yardman burned Chut's nose with a cigarette, to provoke him into a “boxing” match. Enraged, Chut nearly killed his tormentor. (p. 44-45) Then Shorty Magee, the drunken showman who bought Chut and Blue Baby from the suddenly impoverished Hentons, employed a whip to train the kangaroos to put on an act in which Chut "boxes" with him and Blue Baby jumps through a fiery hoop (p.57-58) His innate cruelty, exacerbated by liquor, Shorty savagely beats Blue Baby doe for missing a jump--though physically pretty, she was slightly lame--and several days later the little doe dies from the injuries.

Shorty also beats up on Chut and deprives him water.(p. 65-69). Eventually Chut disembowels the man (Orphan, p.70) and, now, with a price on his head, he flees back to the safety and solitude of the land he remembered as a joey .Along the way, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds. In a fierce encounter, he kills several hounds and is himself wounded: “Chut struck left and right, clutching, kicking. He tore off the dog on his flank--and another slashed his forearm open, so that a red gush of blood lept out! He disemboweled another of his tormentors, and another bounding liver-and-white body struck him from the side and snapping jaws ripped his ear to the base.” (p. 90-91) Chut narrowly escapes, by jumping over a seven-foot barbed wire fence. (p. 97) [Not exactly a children's books, as contemporary critics described it.]

The big islander Black Tobias takes pity on the tiny snails he accidentally crushes underfoot: “In the giant’s steps the little sea snails had been crushed so Tobias” hand had ended the suffering of one little mollusk by snapping it between thumb and finger.” (Reefs, p.18). Thomas Webber’s animal cruelty so disgusts the ordinarily mild-mannered, turn-the-other-cheek Daphne, that she reacts violently to him: “He was touching it with his foot to make it beat his broken wing and he laughed in joy, asking me with his eyes to join him—and he wouldn’t stop! I thrust at him with a piece of broken wood and he stumbled. (Reefs, p. 35)

“They moved with a strange dignity. They were half naked, and hunched in a common purpose. The stronger shapes of youth supported the brittle shapes of age; women bent protectively over the round bundles of babies; small children clung to dead or dying pets.” (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’)

Octogenarian Andrew McNair regrets having as a young man hunted animals for sport. Since then he had come to appreciate and respect the innate nobility of animals: “The great deer-like eyes were rolling, the proudly curved was shaken by the thumping of the panicking heart, but still the creature stood royally, a block between the hunter and the fleeing does. The hunter’s shot dropped the great kangaroo within ten feet of Andrew’s cover.” (‘The Gantlet of Flames’)

”Andrew had seen a wood duck break from her tree nest as a swamp was swept by fire, seen her circle madly and rush back to spread futile wings over downed ducklings—and die in the flames. The duck had known that to return was to die. She had returned because she could not let her ducklings die alone.” (Ibid)

”He remembered them when the land was open, fierce and beautiful creatures, confident in the power of splendid muscles and great chest defiantly standing guard as the does fled; the untold centuries behind them, in which they had faced the attacks of wild dogs or the thousand-foot swoop of the great eagles; fighting, often dying, but always with the fighting chance. Then firearms, the thing they could not reach, but which could kill. And presently their simple brains had known their own helplessness, and sometimes the old ones had fled as madly as the does.”(Ibid)

Seaman Heavy Baileaux, a punch-drunk former boxer, banks on his intuitive knowledge of birds to rely on a cockatoo to save him and his wounded captain from certain death. Baileaux tames the cookatoo and the ship's crew adopts "Cocky" as their mascot. (‘The Pit in the Jungle’)

Daniel, a retarded West Indian islander, intuits how crayfish "think" and this knowledge leads him to discover an undersea treasure of Spanish gold. A kindly, generous man, Daniel values the company of a pet cat as much the treasure. (‘The Mysterious Box’)

Young Liliom and her ornery but kind grandfather, Captain Mort, adopt a heron. When the sadistic overseer shoots the heron for sport’ ”The heron staggered in its flight, its white feathers broke away and floated in a little shower,” Lillom rushes to help it and fears that the heron would think that it was she who shot it. (‘My Love Will Come’) When Liliom tries to flee the island to avoid the evil designs of the overseer, she takes her cat family with her. The overseer's evil is reflected in the body of a dead ray: “The ray was quite dead, but its eyes still gleamed, pale greenish-gold and malevolent, while its belly was white it made the night darker.”(Ibid) Michael, the abused boy who years later returns as one Liliom’s suitors, is thus described: “His eyes were like those of a despairing animal that has done no harm and yet has been beaten. (Ibid)

Steward, the incorrigible teenaged delinquent taken in as by the misguided humanitarian Mrs. Gray, plans to steal his benefactress jewelry. To get into the house, he must get past the family’s pet Terrier, Tiddly Winks. He kicks at and tries to poison Tiddly Winks, but the little terrier thwarts him. (‘The Best Laid Plans’)

A crack shot, Dorothy Cottrell had in her day taken out her share of dingoes, hawks, eagles, and fence-breaking kangaroos, yet she respected all animals for their noble instincts, and she loved her pets for the animal in them, not as surrogate children, as do many urban pet owners: “For many years we had the privilege of owning Spike, a sneezing, hiccupping, incurably vulgar English bulldog of noble ancestry, who would come trundling into my room as my breakfast was served, politely kiss my wheelchair good morning, then stand upon stocky hind legs to say good morning to me. Wanting something from the icebox and fearing he was not going to get it, he was not above blackmail and would plump himself behind the back wheel of my chair, thus effectively anchoring me. When he got what the wanted, he would lumber up to kiss me and lavish a passing lick on the chair. The whole thing, he said, was a joke we shared together, and perhaps he had been a shade mean, but it was a jolly game, wasn’t it?” (‘How to Wear a Wheelchair,’) Dorothy’s Spike recalls the spunky Tiddly Winks:“He ate almost anything in unlimited quantities. He ate with haste, without thought and without shame. As a general rule, the more certain he was that he was not supposed to eat something, the more he liked it.” (‘The Best Laid Plans’)

The scene of Joan Whatmore’s feeling guilty about shooting a kangaroo and her accidentally deliberately missing a dingo though she had a clear shot at it could well have been autobiographical. “Twenty yards from me was a great kangaroo feeding; in one hand he grasped the round green stem of a lily. I ran to my prize and knelt beside him, up till that moment I had felt nothing but the joy of the hunter. I laid my hand on the huge warm bulk and the strong animal scent in him was in my nostrils . just above the heart was a crimson stain, while between his lips he still held the fragile petal. An awful and quite unexpected pity seized me. I jumped to my feet with a shriek.” (Gold, p. 39) ”We put up a big red dingo, who had just killed a kangaroo. I fired at him but was excited, and he was trotting quickly, so the shots went wide. (p. 125) In Homestead, Dorothy adopted three stray cats, Electra, Ajax and one whose name I don’t remember.
Animal characters:

Chut -- The kangaroo protagonist (Orphan)..

Blue Baby -- A slightly lame, but pretty little kangaroo doe, Chut's playmate. Killed by the drunken showman Shorty Magee. (Ibid)

Zodie -- Chut's other playmate, eventually redeems the alienated Chut from a life of solitude in the wild and becomes the queen of his harem. (Ibid)

William Mutton -- An obnoxious lamb who bullies young Chut until he makes the mistake of attacking Blue Baby and causes Chut to retaliate. (Ibid)

Tim -- Joan Whatmore's beloved 140 lb. pet dog and bosom companion after the death of her first husband Clippings. (Gold).

Stumpy -- The spunky pet terrier of Clippings McKenzie. Dies of grief when his master is killed. (Ibid)

Raa -- The Whatmore's ill-tempered stud bull, challenged by Joan’s brother Dickie to prove his manhood. (Ibid)

Dan -- The pet horse and best friend of Donald Barford, champion sheep shearer and gifted storyteller (Battle)

Tiddly Winks – The smart little terrier that outwits the delinquent teen Steward. (‘The Best Laid Plans’)

Cocky –Heavy Baileaux’s, the punch-drunk former boxer, pet cockatoo. (The Pit in the Jungle’)

Humankind

Humankind

If Dorothy harbored any political, religious or social leanings, she kept them to herself, yet her profound empathy for her fellow humans is markedly evident throughout her works. (For full references see Reference Key)

“It shocked me to that any people should have to work until their hands were reddened and their beauty gone away; to work all life-long, and never have time to hear the sweetness of blue-hilled romance that ran in the operas; in old tales that that flowered in the almond tree.” (Gold, p. 51)

”If you could unbutton the neatly brushed, meagre waistcoats of the little neat clerks streaming into the cities every morning and peep at their hearts’ dream, I wonder what it would generally be? Not the hurried lunch and dutiful office surely. Man is still too much the child, loving wooden-battle axe and broom-handle charger, for that. And it always seems a shame somehow to keep him in stiff collar doing sums his life long.” (Gold, p. 206)

”Men, all of them, who lived so much in silence that to talk was a rare, shy delight or a braggart ecstasy, according to the nature of the man. Simple, strong-bodied, somewhat childlike vagabonds for the most part, even the evil amongst them touched by a certain gallantry of courage, the stamp of the rigour and loneliness of their lives. (Earth, p. 8)

Though a community of law-abiding folk and devout churchgoers--Southern Baptist, mainly--racial bigotry, long entrenched by tradition and codified by law, was the norm in Homestead, Florida as was elsewhere, not only in the South, but also, throughout most of America, as well as in white nations in general, Australia included. That cultural bent didn't sit at all well with the fair-minded Dorothy Cottrell. In her stories involving non-white or racially mixed people she goes out of her way to extol their nobility and virtues: “It’s strange that anywhere in the world we still associate quality with a white skin. (‘Hurricane Wedding’)

The Maori islanders who rebuild the roof of Joan and Clippings cabin and teach them how to open coconuts are: ‘Big, merry, soft-voiced, lazy fellows, who, even in their tattered European clothes, fitted into the tropical dusk as Clippings and I never could. (Gold, p.196).

The daughter of Old Backs and his half-caste aborigine concubine, Baada, is thus described: “For Georgina was a little quarter-cast girl, and when such a one is beautiful, it is with the beauty that no can believe unless he sees it: a beauty of crimson and black and dusky gold that takes away the breath--and that you can't believe you have really seen it afterwards. (Battle, p.20)

The Christophe brothers closest friend and most skilled of all Caribbean seamen is the big, noble Black Tobias: “Tobias stood with the immobile majesty of a black king of Africa, but his eyes changed as if the sun bursting through storm had suddenly lighted a dark mangrove pool.” (Reefs, p.9) “Here he sat at the edge of the ripples and scrubbed the majesty of his dark body and even his close-wooled head with handfuls of wet sand.” (Reefs, p.160)

"And the men are big, and many of the women are beautiful. There is a red note in their bronze that may mean there were Cribs on the island in the dead centuries. And the people are illiterate, and speak a most beautiful and ancient English. They are unafraid of storms and very much afraid of ghosts. Poor beyond belief and proud as the Kings of Africa. (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’)

Young Liliom’s first mentor and the voice of common sense and wisdom in the story is Violet Smith, a native black woman. (‘My Love Will Come’)

Dorothy's cast of characters runs the gamut of every human type, from the faithful of the turn-the-other-cheek cult of Followers, who rather be beaten up and killed than defend themselves (Reefs, p. 235 ) to the heartless, craven Thomas Webber (Reefs, p.35), the cruel, drunken Shorty McGee (Orphan, p.66), the sadistic, sociopathic overseer (‘My Love Will Come’), and everything in between. Below are some examples:

Generosity, altruism, kindness:

Clippings Mackenzie, Joan Whatmore’s first husband “not merely would have shared his last crum with a beggar, but also given the whole of it to the first man, rich or poor, who looked as if he might possibly like it.” (Gold, p. 164) “Think, Joan, he didn’t know me from a bar of soap and he couldn't tell if I was lying, and he was out of work, too, and, oh, Joan, he lent me five shillings! . Oh! what fine fellows you do strike. (p.. 224)

Clippings, Jr., the fraternal twin son of Clippings, Sr. and Joan Whatmore, a brat of a kid yet generous to a fault, a trait inherited from his father [ who had died before he was born], asks for an advance of his allowance to give it to an alcoholic homeless man: “Please, Mummy, oh, please! He’s such a poor old man. He’s got nothing but a shirt and trousers, and they’re all torn.” (p. 278)

The Captain of the Sidney Salvation Army hostel where Clippings and Joan were illegally residing at first thought that Joan was a woman of ill-repute and was about to evict her, but then, seeing her lame foot and the predicament that she and Clippings were in, he bent the occupancy rules and allowed her to stay: “He was an immense, kindly, ruddy soul, and I smiled at him in relief.” (Gold, p. 216)

Joan starting to sell her poems and Clippings finally landing a steady job, the couple moved into a modest apartment. The superintendent of the building, Kill'em Patson, ex-heavy weight boxing champion of a Australia, who, “despite his formidable physique, was in reality “a kindly, slow-footed man patiently trying to follow the vagaries of his wife.” (Gold, p. 230)

A nameless swagman [itinerant laborer] takes pity on old Andrew McNair. “He hesitated looking at the slim roll of Andrew's swag [pack]. “You shouldn't be running around like this, Grandpa! I've got a pound in my pocket I was saving for a spree. Here! You take it and get yourself another blanket." (‘The Gantlet of the Flames’)

The retarded islander, Daniel, chose to sell the Spanish gold treasure he found at low price to the government museum rather than at much higher price to gold dealers, so that children could enjoying seeing it on display (‘The Mysterious Box’)

Jean Mareo leaves his cabin unprotected against a oncoming monster hurricane to warn his fellow islanders, and further risks his life to save a senile old man from drowning by knocking him out and carrying him off in his arms. Figuring that they are all doomed, anyway, the priest of the Catholic mission breaks with local custom and marries Jean and his beloved Théresè. The mother superior prepares a bridal suite for them in the storage room. (‘Hurricane Wedding’)

A physician forgoes a lucrative practice on the mainland to serve the poor natives of West Indian Island. (‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’) ”Elizabeth put her arm about a girl great with child. The girl’s naked and trembling body was velvety to the touch. There was something oddly moving in the great girth of the girl. Elizabeth had the illusion that she could feel not merely not merely the girl’s heart but the eagerly beating heart of the unborn child.” (Ibid) “They moved with a strange dignity. They were half naked, and hunched in a common purpose. The stronger shapes of youth supported the brittle shapes of age; women bent protectively over the round bundles of babies; small children clung to dead or dying pets.” (Ibid)

Intelligence, generosity, wisdom, common sense.

Joan Whatmore runs circles intelligence-wise around her brother Dickie, her first husband Clippings and most other characters. The surprisingly well-educated and well-travelled Billy the blacksmith is Joan Whatmore's first tutor, stirs in her the joy of learning and appreciation for good literature. (Gold) Jerry Fenton, Joan's second husband, teaches Joan to pace herself, control her considerable impulses.(Gold) Jerry had postponed courting her in earnest until she matured. (Gold). Joan's father, Marcus, manages the family farm with utmost efficiency and prudence. As Jerry Fenton put it, Marcus Whatmore, like the Creator who said "Let there be light!" tamed and cultivated the land, saying, "Let there be life!," (Gold)

Donald the Shearer, excels not only as the best shearer in the land, but also as master story teller and paragon of folk wisdom and common sense. (Earth, p.15) Continually on the go across the land as his trade requires, he also serves as volunteer
mail-carrier. (p. 51)
“Young Henri Christophe unravels the Thomas Webber’s complex scheme to cheat his insurers..(Reefs). Daphne, the widow of Malcolm, Henri’s older brother, killed by the murderous Hereras in collusion with Webber, holds the Christophe clan together while Henri and his slow-thinking yet intelligent brother, Joseph are off on their boat looking for work to feed the clan and to solve the mystery of the disappearance of Malcolm and his ship. (Reefs)

The native islander Viola Smith tutors young Liliom in the rudiments of womanhood, and the "young man" who finally wins her hand postpones their marriage until the illiterate she gets an education. (‘My Love will Come’) The retarded Daniel uses his “animal’ intelligence to locate a sunken Spanish treasure. (‘The Mysterious Box’)

Arrogance, hypocrisy, stupidity, cowardice, religious benightedness.

Rose Amelia Jerington-Whatmore, Joan’s snobbish, socially pretentious grandmother, mentally abuses, treats as a slave, her niece Martha Matilde, the only person who cares for and puts up with her. Martha Matilde had long foregone marriage and personal interests for her aunt’s sake. When the only woman dies, she bequeaths her estate to Joan and distant relatives, but leaves nothing to Martha Matilde.( Gold).

Doused in cheap perfume, Dickie Whatmore’s wife, Freda, an ignorant peasant girl, lies napping while in the next room a distraught Dickie tries to revive their dead two-week old baby. The not-too-bright elder brother of Joan, had returned from military service in WWI a humorless, narrow-minded man. Feeling pity for the abused Freda, he befriended her, got her pregnant, and announced to the family that he would marry her. When Dickie’s father, Marcus, questions his foolish decision, Dickie angrily breaks with the old man and leaves home never to return. Dickie eventually turns to alcohol for solace. (Gold)

Old H.B. ruthlessly uses and deceives others, his wife included, in his obsessive quest to conquer the wild land of Tharlane, but in the end gets his comeuppance when the “Little Man” he had falsely accused of attempted murder returns from a 30-year prison sentence (Battle, p. 78) and burns down H.B.’s property. Ironically, the very people whom he had used and deceived came to help him fight the fire. (Battle, p.307)

Deep-sea diver Ashby had known about Thomas Webber false insurance claim, had witnessed the sinking of the ship ‘Christophe’ and the cold-blooded murder of its defenseless crew by the thuggish Hereas brothers, but, out of fear and guilt, had chosen to go into hiding rather report the crime to the police. (Reefs, p.50, p.226)

Joan Whatmore’s missionary aunt, Austace, loves humanity but hates people. She meddlingly disapproves of Billy the blacksmith, Joan’s tutor, for his socialist leanings.
In her prudish zeal disguised as Christianity, she takes it upon herself to force parents in tropical islands to clothe their little girls into slips. She stops by for a visit on her way to a mission, bearing nine boxes of Bibles and fourteen boxes of slips. Finally Joan has enough of her aunt’s misguided religion, and snaps: “What right have you to condemn those who differ from your classbound opinions . . . to go jamming nice comfortable little brown babies into ugly slips.” For which impudence 14-year-old Joan is treated a to stinging face-slapping by her mom, Annie. (p. 57). .

Big, strong Joseph Christophe allows a gang of thugs to beat up on him and refuses to come to the aid of his brother Henri, who tried to fend off the attackers with an oar, because fighting back, whatever the circumstances, would be in violation of the turn-the-other-cheek doctrine of his religious cult, The Followers: “Joseph held one oar in his hands, but did not use. Instead he stood with head bowed on his great neck while the corded muscles of his shoulders trembled and his chest rose and fell gaspingly. The man laughed with a low, ugly sound and were onto him, their fists thudding on his unguarded face, their legs tripping him. . . Joseph was on his knees again, with blood gushing over his face. His mere strength was giving the men trouble, but he still did not defend himself.” (Reefs, p.185) Because Joseph would not use his oar against the thugs, his brother Henri was badly hurt and their ship, their only means of earning money to feed their family back home, set on fire. Henri justly upbraids Joseph and slaps him. “How dared you betray us?
With an enemy, one may deal, but with a traitor, one cannot deal! . . . Raising his hand, Henri struck Joseph flat-handed and resoundingly across the cheek. (p. 187)

Heavy Baileaux, a punch drunk former boxing champ an now sailor is subjected to the ridicule his fellow crewmen. (‘The Pit in the Jungle’) The retarded man Daniel is routinely taunted and browbeaten by his superiors and coworkers. (‘The Mysterious Box’)

Cruelty, depravity, evil

Mrs. Gluber, the Whatmore’s head housekeeper, treats the new maid Freda like an animal, and Freda, in turn, casually impales mice with a hatpin. (Gold)

Sandy got his name from having being born on a sandy gutter where his drunken mother had passed out. on a sandy gutter. He becomes the butt of other kid’s mocking and adult jokes. “The neighbours scraped the road off him and called him ‘Sandy,’ (Battle, p. 48). Though his father, Luther, bears Sandy no malice, he neglects him totally, the sole object of his paternal affection, if it could be called that, being the elder son, “Ox,” a huge, strong brute of a lad. (Battle, p. 50) Sandy is mentally and physically abused by his mother. Hungry for a decent meal, Sandy steals a piece of a cake the mother had baked for herself and, when confronted, Sandy blames it on a rat. To teach him a lesson, she burns his fingers on the stove. (p. 51-52)

. Sandy’s mother orders him to fetch her a bottle of whiskey from Murger’s bar. Along the way, the child’s constant hunger is exacerbated by the aroma of cooking food from eateries Afraid of the effects that the liquor will have on her, he returns with a lame story that Murger will not sell her the bottle. The mother becomes furious, forces him to wash the in boiling hot water, while she cooks a hearty breakfast for herself and tauntingly proceeds to savor it. Finally she offers him some, but deliberately drops it on the floor. Sandy, on his hands and knees, picks up the hot food and stuffs it in his shirt to eat later when alone. (Battle, p.60)

A circus featuring a caged “man-eating” lion comes to town. Because t Sandy cannot afford the admission to see the lion, the impresario shoos him away, but his young female assistant, feeling sorry for him, sneaks him in during off hours. The lion’s cage, however, is boarded, so Sandy cannot see the lion, but can smell him “real good.” One of the roles of the female assistant is to attract customers by singing and serving the needs of the impresario, who, it turns out, beats her. (Battle, p. 54)

While Tom Henton is away one day, his yardman stages a boxing match with Henton’s pet kangaroo, Chut, and charges admission. But as Chut refuses to cooperate, the yardman, to rouse him, burns his nose with a cigarette. “The yardman was hot, nervous, exasperated. His audience was threatening to walk out on him. Unnoticed by any of the spectators, he brushed the live cigarette, and holding it hidden in his glove he pressed the glowing tip upon Chut’s sensitive nose. Pressed it hard, twisted it.” (Orphan, p.44)

Having fallen on hard times, Tom Henton is forced to sell Chut and his pretty doe companion, Blue Baby, to the drunken showman, Shorty Magee. Magee trains Blue Baby to jump through a fiery hoop on command, but one day the little doe, being slightly lame, cannot perform the stunt, which sends the showman into a drunken rage: “Jump’ roared Shorty. Twice she tried and failed, singeing her fur and Shorty swore and rained blows upon her. But with some frantic effort of her small strength Blue Baby had broken her dog chain. Blind with fear, she leapt down the long shed, gathering wild speed as she went—and straight into the concrete wall at the shed’s end. It smashed her to the ground in a twisted heap. She lived for three more days, trying to start up now and then from a fitful sleep.” (Orphan p. 66)

The brilliant crook Thomas Webber, enjoyed torturing animals and “would rather have stood laughing in glee, while other men were hurt in prize ring or a sport, while, were a crime to be committed, he would have wished to be afar with a loud alibi.” (Reefs, p. 35) The thuggish Herera clan, colluding with Webber in an elaborate ruse to cheat his insurer, kill the captain and crew of ‘The Christophe,’ who, in obedience to the non-violence teachings of their religious cult, The Followers, refuse to defend themselves, and sink the ship. (p.234-235) Webber gets his comeuppance when he tries to escape and is shot dead by his abused concubine, who on past occasions had sworn to kill him: “And the girl pulled the tiny shape of a gun from under her dress and pointed it at the man and the toy sound of a shot came over the water as the man convulsed at the feet of the girl.” (p. 238)

A born sociopath, the island overseer where Liliom and her grand father reside made a handsome living running drugs and kidnapping young girls for forced prostitution. A girl he kidnapped and is being delivered to a bordello, risks jumping overboard into an alligator-infested lagoon rather than to continue the journey. Aware the overseer would be coming for her, Liliom flees with her cats. The overseer is finally killed in a duel with the young man whom Liliom knew would one day come to marry her. (‘My Love Would Come’)

Dorothy's Ghost

(Short story by Carlos Navarro)

“Hello, it’s Dorothy,” the voice said. I looked up from the exam papers I was grading and saw her, a woman in her early fifties, seated in a wheelchair with a plaid woolen comforter covering her legs. But no sooner had I opened my mouth to speak, than she vanished, and I woke up. Having pulled an all-nighter doctoring my résumé without actually lying, for a job interview at another college, I had dozed off at my desk and dreamt I saw this woman in a wheelchair. So vivid was the dream that it seemed more like an out-of-body experience. The setting was an exact replica of my tiny visiting professor’s office--the book case, the file cabinet, the lamps, the desk--everything the same, except for the woman, Dorothy. And though she appeared for only an moment, her luminous brown eyes and impish half-grin lingered long in my mind.

My visiting professor stint at Davidson College, North Carolina, had been the fifth since I received my Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Pittsburgh twelve years earlier. Had this been the 1960’s, when the demand for language professors was at its peak, I could have easily earned a secure tenured position at a well-endowed college or university. But nowadays language Ph.D.’s like me were a dime a dozen. Though better qualified than most tenured old timers, the best we could do were two year stints in whatever institution would have us, at whatever the going pay rate, which was not much higher than that of the clerical staff. Itinerant slave labor, that’s what we were, too unsettled to marry and raise a family, verging toward middle age with no decent prospects in sight, just more of the same.

I had decided that when my contract at Davidson expired, I would quit academe and join my father in his thriving construction business. But then, on second though, I changed my mind. Maybe at the next college one of the old full-timers would retire, or die, and I would be selected to take his or her place.

Then a week later it happened again. I had dozed off at my desk and there, beside me, in her wheelchair, was Dorothy. This time she didn’t vanish so quickly. “Who are you?” I asked her. “Why do you keep visiting me?”

Dorothy didn’t answer. Instead, she smiled and launched into what obviously was an answer to a question once asked by somebody else.
“A swagman, Carlos, she explained in a distinct Australian accent with a jaunty, playful tone to her voice. “is an itinerant worker; the swag, his bedroll; a billabong,a sort of lake formed at the bow of a winding river; a billy, a crude cooking utensil fashioned from a tin can; a jambuck, a ram; a tuckerbag, a food knapsack; and a coolibah, a tree that grows in watery places, a species of Eucalyptus. Knowing that, you should be able to follow the lyrics of the song without any trouble. Some say it’s based on a true story.”

“I gazed quizzically at the woman in the wheelchair. “Song? What song are you talking about, Dorothy. That is your name, isn’t it? And what strange language is this you’re translating? And who is this Carlos you’re talking to?” And I repeated my earlier question. “But tell me. Who are you? What do you want with me?”

Dorothy, again, didn’t answer, and when I reached to touch her, she again vanished, and I woke up. Though there was no breeze blowing that day, the curtains in my open window were stirring as if disturbed by something flowing out of the room. The Australian woman in the wheelchair, what did she want with me? Was she a dream, or an apparition? Had I really been asleep when I saw her or was I hallucinating, losing my mind? Were the stressful years of job hopping finally getting to me? But, strangely, I didn’t care. Whoever or whatever the woman was, dream or ghost, I was hoping she would visit me again. I had liked her on sight. Maybe next time she’d stay a while longer.

And she did. In her third visit she spoke of stories and novels she had written, one about a mistreated pet kangaroo, another about a family eking out a living in the Outback of Australia. She also spoke lovingly of her husband, Mac, their travels by boat in the West Indies, their three-story house in Homestead, Florida, and, when done, as in her previous visits, she vanished, again without answering my questions.

But I didn’t need to hear her answer. From the names she mentioned, Carlos and Mac, and their residence in Homestead, Florida, I was finally was able to figure out who my ghostly visitor was and, eventually, what she wanted from me. The Carlos she addressed in her translation of the swagman song was none other than my father, and Mac, her husband, full name Walter McKenzie Cottrell, was my father’s Boy Scout Master when Dad emigrated from Cuba to Homestead in the 1950’s.

I recalled that when my brother Luke and I were homeschooled, Dad used to regale us with stories of how Mac used take his Scouts on weekend “survival” excursions into the nearby Everglades wilderness, to live entirely off the land, with no gear other than machetes, knifes, a coil of rope, a first-aid kit, and a flint-and-steel or wooden friction set to build their fires. Dad also recounted how folks for miles around would find some pretext to drop by the Cottrell's three-story frame house, dubbed the “haunted house” before they moved in, to see the ingenious hand-pulley elevator that Mac had rigged for his handicapped wife, Dorothy. Dad swore it worked better than a motor-driven one, and it cost less than $300 to build.

Those oft-told stories about Mac and Dorothy Cottrell apparently had made a lasting impression on me. And that song whose words the woman in the wheelchair had translated, I now remembered, was the Australian iconic “Waltzing Matilda.” Dad used to sing it to us at bedtime. He had learned it when a Scout in Mac's troop. Dad was thirteen at the time, and Mac, and Dorothy in their fifties. That was over half a century ago, so both Mac and Dorothy, I figured, must be long dead by now. The woman in the wheelchair, then, was no stranger. She was the ghost of Dorothy Cottrell.

Next day I phoned Dad. After our usual exchange of greeting and casual chit-chat about family matters—-my mom’s upcoming retirement from her post as editor at the UN, my brother Luke’s dentistry practice, my next visiting professor stint-- I brought up my memories of his stories of the neighbors that had so impressed him in his youth. On hearing their names, Dad’s voice waxed animated.

“Mac and Dorothy Cottrell? Why, off course I remember them well. How could I forget them. Hell, they were my role models back when I was in dire need of role models. When you and Luke were little I used to entertain you with stories about my camping trips in the Everglades with Mac’s Boy Scout troop. Remember?”

“Yes,” I nodded into the phone. “I remember those stories well.”

“Mac,” Dad went on, “was one of the most respected men in town, a Scout Master and community team player. But looking back, I’d have to say that Dorothy was the one I most admired.”

“Why was that, Dad?”

“Well, imagine her, a polio victim since age five, bound for life to a wheelchair, yet learning to sail, swim, shoot, plant gardens, travel over rough terrain and, on top of all that earn a living as an artist and a writer. In her day, she was a best selling author. Some of her stories were made into movies. I have nothing but praise and fond memories of Dorothy Cottrell.”

”But as a person, what was she like? You say you have fond memories of her. What are some?”

“Well, of the seventeen scouts in Troop 14, or “foreen” as Mac pronounced it in his Scottish brogue, I was Dorothy’s favorite. Why, I’m not sure. My father, as you know, was killed in an auto accident and my mom sent me to live with an uncle in Homestead, a close friend of the father of the actor, Desi Arnaz. I told you many stories about them also."

”Yes, I remember those stories about their love-hate relationship. A colorful Cuban duo, those two.”

“Colorful is too mild a word for them,” Dad chortled. “But back to the Cottrells. When I joined Mac’s troop I could barely speak English and was still hurting over my father’s death. 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 must have anchored in Cuba at one time or another. But whatever the reason, she took a special liking to me, and I to her.”

”So what was your relationship with her like?”

“Well, to give you an example. One day I had gone to the her house to give her a rattlesnake wallet I had made for her, when she happened to be meeting with some bigwig from New York, the editor of a major magazine, if I recall. But instead of asking me to come back later, Dorothy insisted that I join them. And so there were sat, the three of us—the famous author, the bigwig guy, and rustic 13-year-old me giving them a lecture in broken English on how to skin and cook rattlesnakes. A delicious white meat, by the way”

“I can see why you were so fond of her, and she obviously was fond of you.”

“Yes, I'm sure she was. Dorothy Cottrell. Bless her soul. Loving but not sentimental, tough but not hard, curious but not prying, talkative but not glib, venturesome but not reckless, upbeat without being giddy—the Aristotelian Golden Mean between extremes. A truly admirable person.” Though a civil engineer by profession, Dad was an avid reader of philosophy books. He particularly got a kick of metaphysicians who went to great lengths to prove that they really knew nothing. “Hell,” he would laugh, “I could come to same conclusion in one brief sentence.”

“But tell me, Son,” he inquired. “Why, after all these years are you suddenly so interested in Dorothy Cottrell?"

“Oh, I don’t know, Dad. Maybe it’s because the other day she visited me in a dream so vivid that I thought she was right there in the room with me.”

“Really? But you never met her. She died fifteen years before you were born? How could you possibly have dreamt what she looked like?"

“Through your descriptions of her, I suppose. Your Cottrell stories were pretty vivid.”

“O.K., then, let me test you. Describe the Dorothy Cottrell you saw in your dream."

“Well, she looked to be in her early fifties, light-skinned, small but sinewy, dark eyes, black hair streaked with gray. She was seated on what appeared to be a state-of-the-art wheelchair with a plaid woolen comforter covering her legs.”

“Wow, that was Dorothy, alright! My descriptions of her must have been pretty vivid, indeed, for it to have made such a lasting impression on you.”

“Also, in another dream—-I’ve had several—she translated the dialectical vocabulary of 'Waltzing Matilda.'”

“Swagman, billabong, collibah billy, jambuck, tuckerbag? Those words?"

“Yes, those words. You used to sing the song to us, I had forgotten the lyrics, but then they came back to me after I heard Dorothy translate the key words in my dream.”

Dad paused a moment to clear his throat his throat. “'Waltzing Matilda',you know, is the most famous folk song in Australia. Their unofficial national anthem.” And in an off-tune voice further distorted by the crackle of the cell phone, he belted out the first lines.
“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,/ Under the shade of a coolibah tree,/ And he sang as he watched and waited 'til his billy boiled/ You'll come a-Waltzing Matilda with me"

”I see you haven’t lost your musical touch,” I jested. “But I don’t recall you ever telling us who this Matilda was.”

”Well, some say she was a real woman, the swagman’s deceased wife; but according to most interpretations, Matilda was the swagman’s swag, his bedroll. Because there were so few women in sheep country for a man to keep warm or dance with, the swagman’s swag apparently was the closest thing to it. Men out in the wilderness get pretty lonely, you know, and after a while start imagining feminine spirits in their possessions and surroundings.”

“Like the French explorers in the Rockies who named the mountains in the offing the Grand Tetons, big tits.” .

Dad chuckled. “Yes, precisely. They do resemble big tits.” “And now, let me guess. It was Dorothy Cottrell who taught you ‘Waltzing Matilda.’” Right? .

“Yes, as a matter of fact, she did. Now and then our troop would meet in the living room of their house, and it was at one of those meetings that she introduced us to "Waltzing Matilda". Though none of us had ever heard the song before and, of course, had no clue what swagman, etc meant until she told us. Hell, I was having trouble enough understanding standard English words. We adopted 'Waltzing Matilda' as our campfire song. When we got to the line: ‘Down came the troopers; one, two, three.’ We’d all stand up and shout out the numbers. Among her many gifts, Dorothy had fine, robust singing voice, an alto, if I recall.”

“You campfire song, you say?”

“Yes, hard to believe, but back in those days, before the advent of a TV set in every home, singing and story telling were the most popular forms of home entertainment, that and charades, particular in rural communities like the one where we lived."

“My, how times have changed!”.

“Nor did anyone there do much reading,” Dad continued. “None of my American fellow scouts had an inkling that Dorothy was a best selling author. To them, she was just the 'crippled wife' of our Scout Master, a very nice lady, that was all. It was only years later, after I joined the Navy that I read some of her works. But, I ask you again, Son, why are you having such vivid dreams about someone long dead and that you knew only through me?”

“Well, Dad, now that you mention it, that’s how it was in the dream. Dorothy never addressed me directly or answered my questions. She spoke only to you, Carlos.”

“Wow! This is getting spooky!”

“Yes, very spooky. The Dorothy Cottrell that visited me was no mere dream. She was more like an apparition, a ghost, if you will, yet not in the least scary.”

Dad paused a moment to reflect. “Son, I recall from my childhood in Cuba that though people professed to be Christians, the unofficial religion was Santería, a form of voodoo, so most Cubans, my folks included, believed in spirits.”

“Yes, I’ve heard from Cuban colleagues of mine that that’s still the case in Cuba. Even hidebound Marxists in the Cuban Government—-Fidel, Raul and their entire staff--believe in spirits. And most of my Cuban colleagues as well, though they're reluctant to admit it.”

“Hell,” Dad went on. “Our home was haunted with all kinds of spirits, good, bad, but mostly insignificant. Just lost souls looking for a place to rest. So it could be that I subconsciously passed on those memories of my childhood on to you, along with the stories of Dorothy and Mac Cottrell, and in your dream, you made a connection.”

“Could be,” I muttered.

“But trust me, Son.. There are no such things as ghosts. Once dead, people either pass on to the Great Beyond, if there is such a thing, or simply cease to exist, save in the memories of those who remember them, and when these also die, they are completely forgotten. But actual ghosts? apparitions? No way. A physical impossibility.”

Detecting a shift of tone to his voice, I smiled at the phone and said. “Dad, somehow you don’t sound quite convinced.”

Dad again hesitated, trying to connect the conflicting thoughts and memories chasing each other through his brain. “Well, no, of course, I mean, no mortal has a monopoly on the truth. Maybe you were, indeed visited by Dorothy’s ghost. But if she didn’t speak to you directly, delivered no message or offered no advice, what difference did her visit make? She might as well have stayed home in the Afterlife.”

“Like that grandaunt of yours who claimed to have had visions of the Virgin Mary?”

Dad chortled. “Yes, her, Tía Petrona. She kept seeing the Virgin Mary in her kitchen, but the Virgin would just stand there, saying nothing, statue-like, with a blank look on her face. So after a while Tía Petrona got bored with her, and the Virgin never appeared to her again.”

“But Dorothy’s ghost, Dad, she’s was no statue. She talked, and gestured with her hands and head. She was more alive than most live bodies in this college.”

“Well, then, why don’t you wait her out. Maybe she’ll talk to you directly and tell you what wants,” Dad said jokingly.

“Yes, that’s what I’ll do, wait her out,’ I said, going along with the humor. “I’m sure she’ll visit me again.” Then remembering what he had said about the Cottrells’ house, I asked:

“You mentioned that the old house they bought in Homestead was haunted. Were there really ghosts living in it?”
Dad though for a moment. ”That old house, it was a story in itself. It sat on the corner of Tennessee Road and Coconut palm drive, atop a slight knoll, some thirty yards from either road. Our house, which you have seen pictures of, 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 you and the Cottrells weren’t exactly neighbors."

“No, not in the urban sense of the word. Today the Atlantic southeast region of Florida, from Fort Lauderdale to Key West, Homestead included, is one unbroken chain of motels, housing developments and shopping centers. But back then, Homestead and the surrounding area, was a sparsely populated agricultural community. From the Cottrell house, the town of Homestead proper was five miles south, and Miami, twenty miles north. A few miles to the West was the Everglades wilderness, where Mac used to take us camping. Much of that has since been later drained to provide water for the urban sprawl”

“But back to the Cottrell house. Why did people think it was haunted?”

“Because, for one, it was so different from the rest. The typical Florida home back then was, and still is, a one story cinderblock structure so built to minimize the impact of hurricane force winds and guard against termite damage.”

“Like the one where you lived? I recall seeing pictures of it.”

“Yes, long and low slung. But the Cottrell house was a three-story gabled wooden structure, like the kind built in New England in the 19th Century, something right out of one Poe’s or Hawthorne’s stories. In fact it was the oldest house in that part of Florida, built by some wealthy Northerner named Gossman, some thirty or forty years before Miami or Homestead were settled.

“And just because the house was old and different looking people assumed it was haunted?”

“No, there was more to it. Not only did the house look spooky, like a set from a horror movie, but some locals spread the rumor that a murder-suicide had once taken place on the third floor and that town 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 house remained vacant, until the Cottrells bought it.”

“But why on earth would they buy the only three-story house in all of South Florida if Dorothy was bound to a wheelchair. Wouldn’t a typical one-story Florida house made more sense?”

“That, I can’t tell you. All I know is that they bought the house and Mac fixed it up himself. He was quite the handyman. Cleared the brush around it, and made it livable for Dorothy. Like that elevator he built so she could get up to the top floors, on the south side of the house, with Dorothy’s help. Our teen-aged neighbor across the street, Ron Gagliardi, who worked part-time on the project, recalled how Dorothy scooted around in her wheelchair as if she was one the workers. .

“So I suppose that after the Cottrells moved to the old house didn’t look quite so spooky."

“No, not at all. Now it looked more like a bread and breakfast inn. Just off the elevator, Dorothy grew flowers on pots set on racks at wheelchair level. And inside, when she wasn’t writing, she was cooking, baking or canning. Some of us scouts, though, couldn’t shake the ghost stories. When the troop met in the living room we couldn’t help but steal glances up the stairs, expecting to see ghosts.”

“You’re right, Dad, the story of that old house is a story in itself. But tell me if was that tall and made of wood, wouldn’t a hurricane have blown it down or termites reduced to dust?"
“No, not this old house. It wasn’t stitched together like the ones mass produced nowadays. The structure was a sturdy post and beam. No studs or joists. and the wood—floors, siding, sheathing, rafters—-all termite and rot proof Dade pine.”

“Like the cypress pilings holding up the city of Venice, Italy,” I said.

“Yes, a similar kind of wood. And because the house was never painted, it looked all the more spooky.”

“So maybe that was why the Cottrells bought it, because it had character, and a couple of resident ghosts in the bargain.”

“Well, Maybe so. Writers do tend to have a wild imagination, although I’m sure that Dorothy didn’t believe in ghosts, or Mac either. Anglos are not like us Cubans. They’re a more sober people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Anglos believe in ghosts, goblins, spooks, fairies and such, as much, or even more than Cubans do spirits. Remember, Shakespeare’s plays abound with all sorts of ghosts and supernatural beings. Then there’s the swagman in 'Waltzing Matilda'.”

“Ah yes, the famous swagman. He jumped into the billabong to avoid capture and drowned, but his ghost lived on.” And Dad belted out the last lines of the song.”
“And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong/ “’You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me!’”

"Great voice, Dad," I jested again. ”But back to the old the old house, I’m curious. What became of it after the Cottrells moved out? Is it still standing?"

"No. Shortly after Dorothy died, in the third floor, where the murder suicide had allegedly taken place—-Mac found her dead there one morning—-the house burned to the ground."

"And how about Mac? Did he remain in Homestead. Did you stay in touch with him?"

“No, I was serving in the Navy when all that happened, in 1957. I only learned about it when I came home on leave a month later. Mac had meanwhile returned to Australia leaving no forwarding address. And as to Dorothy, her whereabouts is a mystery.”

”Her whereabouts a mystery? But didn’t she die?"

”Yes, but to this day I don’t know where she was buried, or if her body was cremated, or a memorial service held for her. Strange for one of the more popular writers in her day.”

"That is mysterious," I said.

”My guess is that she wanted it that way. When she saw the Grim Reaper approaching. She probably instructed her heirs to dispense with the conventionally postmortem rituals, because she wanted to live on in the memory of her future readers as the venturesome, energetic person she had always been, not as a corpse. But I can’t be sure”

”You’re probably right,” I said, imagining the anguish that someone like a Shakespeare or a Walt Whitman would have suffered at the moment of death had they known they would be forever embalmed in footnotes and scholarly articles.

”But all this talk about Ghosts and haunted houses—-Hell, we’ve been at it now for half an hour—it’s just idle talk, Son, isn’t it? You couldn’t possibly believe any of it.” Then chuckling, “Because if you do, I’ll schedule an appointment with your nearest psychiatrist first thing tomorrow morning.”

”No need to Dad,” I said, returning the chuckle. “I may be a bit eccentric, but I’m not crazy. It was all idle talk, as you say.” Then bidding each other a cursory “bye,” we simultaneously cut off.

But I wasn’t altogether truthful. The dream or ghost or whatever that vision of Dorothy Cottrell was had utterly possessed me. That evening, in preparation for her next visit, I cruised the Internet for information on her and learned that though she had once been a highly successful novelist and short story writer, all her books had been out of print for decades, and that hardly anyone today, not even in her native Australia, had heard of her.
So now I understood why she had visited me. Dad had guessed right. She did not want to be cast into oblivion. She wanted to live on in the memory of the living and figured—if what goes on in the minds of ghosts can be called figuring—that I could help her. But because we never knew each other, because we had no common memories, the only way she could reach me was through the memories of my father, who, for all I knew, may have been the only person alive who remembered her. Was I losing touch with reality? Maybe, but it felt kind of good, therapeutic. A lot more interesting than doctoring my oft- doctored résumé.
I thereby resolved to do all I could to resurrect Dorothy Cottrell, by creating a web page about her life and works. Now I was ready for her next visit.

She appeared to me again in my office, this time wearing a denim apron rather a woolen comforter over her legs. Her face seemed somewhat flushed, with a sun bonnet on her head, as if she been out working on her garden. Without further ado, she began talking in an animated pitch, to my father Carlos as before, her dark eyes intently fixed in my direction, yet not looking directly at me.

“You see, Carlos, it was like this with me. When I contracted polio at age five, well-meaning counselors convinced my family that by learning to walk with state-of-the-art crutches and braces, I could lead a normal life. But it didn’t work. People couldn't help but see, and in my child’s mind it was perfectly obvious to me, that I was different. So not until I stopped trying to be like everybody else and started to see what could be done with just me, differently but comfortably sitting in a swift little wheelchair, I began to reopen the doors of life.”

”Since then I have had a radiantly happy life. And by a happy life I do not mean one of beautiful thoughts and compensations, but one of much adventure in half the odd corners of the world with Mac. If the good fairy of the old stories offered me the one gift, the ability to walk would not be the thing I would ask for. More years with my husband than I would normally expect, the ability to write better—a dozen things—would come before it.
I have only one great grievance. And that is the shortness of time. I know that I have to die some day, and that may be sooner than I wish. Yet I do not want to cease to exist, for it all to end in nothingness. I would die in peace knowing that I would somehow be remembered.” Saying that, a sad look came over her eyes, and she fell silent.

“Dorothy! Dorothy!” I said half shouting, though not expecting her to hear me. “I understand you. Really. My father, Carlos, explained it all to me. He was your friend. Trust me. I’ll see to it that you are not forgotten.”

But this time Dorothy did hear me. For a moment she locked eyes with me, flicked a knowing little smile, then vanished, never to return. She would not need to visit me again. The title of the web page I created for her is “Dorothy Ida Cottrell, 1902-1957.” Comments and suggestions welcomed.