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Issue Details: First known date: 2016... 2016 'So Many Sparks of Fire' : Dorothy Cottrell, Modernism and Mobility
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'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)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Queensland Review Queensland Modernism vol. 23 no. 2 2016 11363617 2016 periodical issue

    'To posit Queensland's modernism may seem like an oxymoron. Queensland is often the butt of the southern states’ jokes. North of its more cultured and intellectual sibling-states (or so popular perception would have it), Queensland is ‘backward’, naïve, behind the times, provincial. According to this mythology, Brisbane is a glorified country town, Queenslanders refuse daylight saving for the sake of their very sensitive cows and curtains, and there is very little ‘culture’ to mention.' (Editorial introduction)

    2016
    pg. 164-177
Last amended 16 Apr 2018 11:14:05
164-177 'So Many Sparks of Fire' : Dorothy Cottrell, Modernism and Mobilitysmall AustLit logo Queensland Review
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