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Works about this Work
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'So Many Sparks of Fire' : Dorothy Cottrell, Modernism and Mobility
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 23 no. 2 2016; (p. 164-177) 'The broad brush strokes of Dorothy Cottrell's paintings in the National Library of Australia mark her as a modernist artist, although not one who painted the burgeoning Sydney Harbour Bridge or bright still-life paintings of Australian flora. Rather, she captured the dun surrounds of Ularunda Station, the remote Queensland property to which she moved in 1920 after attending art school in Sydney. At Ularunda, Cottrell eloped with the bookkeeper to Dunk Island, where they stayed with nature writer E.J. Banfield, then relocated to Sydney. In 1924 they returned to Ularunda and Cottrell swapped her paintbrush for a pen, writing The Singing Gold. After advice from Mary Gilmore, whom her mother accosted in a pub, Cottrell send it to the Ladies Home Journal in America. It was snapped up immediately, optioned for a film and found a publisher in England, who described it as ‘a great Australian book, and a world book’. Gilmore added, ‘As an advertisement for Australia, it will go far — the Ladies Home Journal is read all over the world’. Cottrell herself also went far, emigrating to America, where she wrote The Silent Reefs, set in the Caribbean. Cottrell's creative, intellectual and physical peregrinations — all undertaken in a wheelchair after she contracted polio at age five — show how the local references the international, and vice versa. Through an analysis of the life and writing of this now little-known Queensland author, this essay reflects the regional and transnational elements of modernism as outlined in Neal Alexander and James Moran's Regional Modernisms, illuminating how a crack-shot with a rifle once took Queensland to the world.' (Publication abstract)
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'So Many Sparks of Fire' : Dorothy Cottrell, Modernism and Mobility
2016
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , vol. 23 no. 2 2016; (p. 164-177) 'The broad brush strokes of Dorothy Cottrell's paintings in the National Library of Australia mark her as a modernist artist, although not one who painted the burgeoning Sydney Harbour Bridge or bright still-life paintings of Australian flora. Rather, she captured the dun surrounds of Ularunda Station, the remote Queensland property to which she moved in 1920 after attending art school in Sydney. At Ularunda, Cottrell eloped with the bookkeeper to Dunk Island, where they stayed with nature writer E.J. Banfield, then relocated to Sydney. In 1924 they returned to Ularunda and Cottrell swapped her paintbrush for a pen, writing The Singing Gold. After advice from Mary Gilmore, whom her mother accosted in a pub, Cottrell send it to the Ladies Home Journal in America. It was snapped up immediately, optioned for a film and found a publisher in England, who described it as ‘a great Australian book, and a world book’. Gilmore added, ‘As an advertisement for Australia, it will go far — the Ladies Home Journal is read all over the world’. Cottrell herself also went far, emigrating to America, where she wrote The Silent Reefs, set in the Caribbean. Cottrell's creative, intellectual and physical peregrinations — all undertaken in a wheelchair after she contracted polio at age five — show how the local references the international, and vice versa. Through an analysis of the life and writing of this now little-known Queensland author, this essay reflects the regional and transnational elements of modernism as outlined in Neal Alexander and James Moran's Regional Modernisms, illuminating how a crack-shot with a rifle once took Queensland to the world.' (Publication abstract)
Has serialised
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Earth Battle,
single work
novel
'The central character, Old H.B., as he was known, is a remarkable lump of a man in whom runs the craving of the pioneer to conquer the stubborn land, and the reader follows his ambitious course as he lays his hands upon a thousand square miles of country which had defied subjugation, and gradually masters it to his will. Crude, and almost savage, he works an unscrupulous way to financial strength, and In the hour of triumph experiences the bitterness of defeat at the hands of a man whom he had at tha outset sent to gaol for a murderous assault which H.B. knew to have been the work of another. More savoury side lights are to be found in the pathetic simplicity of Sary who with gratitude takes on from H.B. a selection which is well-nigh hopeless; in the sentiment of the wooing of Donald and Georgina; in the pathos of Sandy's loss of his beloved Martha, a victim to unattended childbirth; and in the countryside humour of ever-jocular men filled with the true philosophy of bush life.'
Source:
'Another Cottrell Novel', Telegraph, 15 November 1930, p.14.
- The Singing Gold, single work novel
