Dorothy Cottrell

Dorothy Cottrell was born in Picton, New South Wales, in 1902 and contracted polio when she was five. It affected her legs, back and left arm. Her mother, recently separated from Cottrell’s father, could not cope with Cottrell’s disability and returned Queensland to keep house for her brother Ernest at his stations Elmina and Ularunda, while Cottrell was cared for in Sydney by her aunt Lavinia Fletcher. Cottrell never went to school, but was tutored in art by the sculptor Theodora Cowan (Ross and Rutledge, 1981). In 1918, when she was sixteen, Cottrell won a scholarship at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales.

When she finished her art education, Cottrell returned to Queensland and in 1922 she secretly married her uncle’s bookkeeper, Walter Cottrell, and a few months later they eloped to Dunk Island, off the coast between Rockhampton and Cairns. The Cottrells stayed with journalist and nature writer E.J. Banfield, who had moved there in 1900. Cottrell had become entranced by Banfield after reading his 1909 work, The Confessions of a Beachcomber. Six months after the Cottrells arrived, however, Banfield died suddenly of peritonitis and their arrangements to stay on the island fell into disarray. They sailed for Sydney because Dorothy thought it the best place to sell her art, posters and cartoons. When the family’s anger over their elopement died down, the Cottrells returned to Ularunda (Ross 1997, p. 65).

Dorothy set down her paintbrush and picked up her pen. She wrote four manuscripts, of which two were published. The first, The Singing Gold (1929), was an immediate success. The Ladies Homes Journal offered her five thousand dollars for serial rights, then Houghlin Mifflin and Co in Boston, and Hodder and Stoughton in England offered her publication (Gilmore, 1928). As a consequence of Cottrell’s sales, both in Australia and abroad, Cottrell’s tax bill was enormous and she began to think about travelling overseas. Rather than paying the tax, she and her husband absconded to America.

There, she published her second novel, Tharlane (1930). Although it was successful, the Cottrells were hard hit by the Depression. They abandoned the house they built at Lake Elsinore in California and took to the road in their car. Cottrell, once more profiting from her art, began to write children’s books and sell stories to magazines. Her 1936 novella about Chut the Kangaroo, Wilderness Orphan, was made into a successful film, Orphan of the Wilderness (Ross, 1991, p. 25). A mystery set in the Caribbean, The Silent Reefs, was published in 1954 and serialised in The Saturday Evening Post, then made into a film, The Secret of the Purple Reefs (1960).

In ‘How to Wear a Wheelchair’, the only known piece of Cottrell’s autobiographical writing (although her fiction is often thinly-veiled autobiography), Cottrell describes the attempts of her family and medical practitioners to force her to conform to a notion of able-bodiedness, which served only to make her miserable. She writes:

‘[T]he keynote of conventional counsel to those who contact the disabled is to pretend that the disabled are like everybody else. And a whole bookful of nonsense that has arisen around disability is based on the shame of difference and the ban against the admission of difference’ (Saturday Evening Post, p. 45).

After contracting polio, her family spent ‘thousands of dollars’ on compelling Cottrell to walk (p. 45). For two years she was unhappy, until she went to see her family doctor who told her that she would never walk any better, and recommended that she ‘Specialise, tadpole! Sit down … be different … and specialise!’ Cottrell writes that ‘the day on which I burned the last overpriced crutch and brace and sat down marked the real beginning of my recovery. Not of recovery from my disability – that has become neither better nor worse than it was the day the first specialist reviewed my case – but of recovery as an individual, as the builder of a life.’

Unsurprisingly, building is a feature of this article. Cottrell’s husband made modifications to the kitchen so that she can cook, and he creates a lift so that she can get upstairs. Cottrell also describes adaptations to a yacht so that she and her husband could sail the Pacific. Core to her life as a disabled person was planning – she would create spreadsheets of what she wanted to do, see what she needed to do it, and then go about creating the necessary adaptations. In this Cottrell shows the high levels of organisation and problem-solving skills common to disabled people.