Review of 'The Mysterious Box' by Dorothy Cottrell

Over at The Australian Legend, my blogging pal and sometimes-correspondent and yet-to-be caffeinating acquaintance Bill is running his annual spotlight on Australian women writers. This year he is up to Generation 3, which consists of women who wrote between 1919-1960. Dorothy Cottrell featured on one of his lists, and as I’m planning to write a book about her one day, I thought I would revisit her writing.

Cottrell was born in Picton, NSW in 1905 and contracted polio five years later. She spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. This didn’t stop her from attending art school, moving to her uncle’s farm and becoming a crack shot with a rifle, eloping with her uncle’s bookkeeper to Dunk Island, moving back to Sydney to make money from her drawings, and then to American to escape the tax office because she was so successful. In America, she and her husband sailed around the Caribbean in a yacht and she continued to publish stories in newspapers and magazines. A couple of films were also based upon her work (for eg Wilderness Orphan based on a pet kangaroo).

With the encouragement of Mary Gilmore (herself a writer whose style shifted from Victorian to the more experimental Modernism), Cottrell published her first novel The Singing Gold in 1928. In an essay in a special issue on Modernism published in Queensland Review a few years ago, I argue that this heavily autobiographical novel is an example of Modernism (which has traditionally been considered in the context of urban life) transposed to the regions. It’s a very visual novel, which is not surprising as Cottrell trained as an artist in Sydney with Datillo Rubbo, and her sketches and paintings show the broad brushstrokes and geometric planes of Modernism. In The Singing Gold, a scene of droving in the dry and dusty outback, attended by flocks of tiny larks that hover over the sheep, is transformed through long, lyrical sentences into a vision of lustrous, shimmering gold (see here for the passage that knocked my socks off). This novel also focusses on the quotidian, another feature of Modernist writers, particularly female Modernist writers and artists (think of Margaret Preston’s paintings of native flower arrangements).

The Cottrells’ move to America coincided with the Depression, so Dorothy abandoned Modernism and began to write more commercial work to bring in money. Her plot-driven stories were serialised in the Ladies Home Journal, among others, and feature romances and life on the high seas, drawing on her love of sailing - the wheelchair didn’t stop her there, either – the Australian Dictionary of Biography states that ‘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.’

In this sense Cottrell broke free of the throttling post-war conservatism that, as scholar Susan Sheridan discusses in her 2001 Dorothy Green Lecture, shoehorned women into femininity and domesticity. As Sheridan points out, women were actively making art during this period, but were described as creating ‘in their spare time’ so as not to rock the boat. Thea Astley, Sheridan writes, ‘tells a horror story of how she felt she had to “neuter” herself, to take on a masculine narrative stance, in order to be taken seriously as a writer.’ Female poets such as Judith Wright fared a bit better, possibly because of male mentors such as Douglas Stewart, poetry editor of the Bulletin, and because poetry tended to escape the censor’s pen.

Cottrell, sailing in the clear seas of the Caribbean rather than the hotbed of anti-communist and nationalistic fervour of post-war Australia, was motivated by a different set of concerns. The most obvious of these, as mentioned above, was the need to make money; another was her wanderlust (she said that if she had travelled less, she might have written more) and a third was her love of the natural world. This latter is what I enjoy most about her work, particularly her descriptions of its sensory profusion and its force (hurricanes feature often in her stories). However her depictions of Caribbean people grate on me (there is usually a white saviour), even as I recognise that Cottrell was of her time.

Being in Munich rather that Brisbane, where I could have gone to the State Library of Queensland to look up Earth Battle, Cottrell’s second novel which I’ve been meaning to read for years, I’ve selected one of her stories saved in my folders, ‘The Mysterious Box,’ published in The Saturday Evening Post on 26th June 1954. The story opens with a Caribbean man, Daniel, on his way towards his boat on the shore. He stops to part the ‘heart-leaved trees’ to see a dilapidated cottage on which he has his heart set to make his home (complete with a pearl-grey cat). However, he feels (and must have felt before) a terrible sense of loss ‘for the non-existent cat, for the brilliance and perfection of the cottage as it could be and was not.’

I thought this was going to be another tedious story along the lines of ‘Hurricane, North Atlantic’ published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1947, in which the white doctor and his wife struggle to save an island’s inhabitants during a hurricane (and the wife, who has told her husband she is leaving because she’s sick of island life, suddenly realises how much she loves him and decides to stay, blergh), but the next few lines of the story diverted me. Cottrell continues Daniel’s story: ‘Threading through the final stunted mangroves bordering the sound, [Daniel] considered the three things that put the cottage beyond his reach: the poorness of the islands, the fact that he was black, and the fact that he was “simple”.’ I was interested because of the mention of disability, race and poverty, and read on to see how Cottrell treated these subjects.

As a 25 year old captain, Daniel, who was preparing dynamite to blast a pathway through the reef (I’ve read of this happening a few times in Cottrell’s stories, it must have been a common technique), accidentally sets off the dynamite, killing his young wife and damaging his head. Cottrell describes Daniel’s disability thus: ‘It took him longer to think of things than it took other men; longer to make a reply. But he was also much closer to the birds and the animals and the insects than were normal people.’ 

Daniel’s perspective offers Cottrell an opportunity to pen her detailed descriptions of the living world: ‘he noted now that the sound was full from the east wind and that where the salt water lapped in round the little mangroves it was very clear; part sky reflections, part glimpses of submerged roots and rock, part shadow patterns of the little trees. And on the exposed rock were segmented ice plants and the brighter green of purslane – that had made new leaves since yesterday – while the lappety, floppety slap of the sea was a whisper and a running tune.’ It’s lovely writing.

Here, too, is evidence of Cottrell’s plotting: create a character, create enough sympathy for that character to enable the reader to root for them, and then put something in the character’s way to make the reader read on to see if the character gets what they want. Daniel creates beautiful quilts and embroideries, and ‘each year he sold one quilt locally to pay for materials and for the postage on the rest, which were sent to delight children who would never walk again.’ That engendered my sympathy for Daniel, perhaps also because it’s clear that Cottrell is drawing on her own experience here.

However, I didn’t buy her depiction of Daniel as someone who is intellectually impaired. Daniel’s close observation of the natural world leads him to contemplate the crabs on the beach that collect pieces of jewellery in their claws. After searching the area for six months, he unearths some treasure (the ‘mysterious box’ of the title) while diving in a storm. The only way that Daniel seems different to anyone else is his need to ask an elderly fellow inhabitant, Granny Fich (who seems to have seizures, if I interpreted ‘fits’ correctly) what he should do with his heavy spoils. Daniel muses that he wishes the island’s commissioner, who had once been kind to him and commented favourably on his quilts, would tell him what to do. Granny Fich recommends that Daniel hide the box in a watermelon in a crate and take it to the commissioner.

Daniel sets sail for the commissioner’s residence, but the watermelon begins to suppurate in the heat and the captain threatens to throw it overboard. Daniel is adamant about holding onto the melon and an interesting switch occurs: it is thought that because Daniel is intellectually impaired, he shouldn’t be parted from his attachment. He is allowed to keep the melon, and when he docks he takes it to the commissioner, benefits from his spoils and buys his house with the pearl-grey cat and some proper black tea for Granny Fich. Cottrell, although she positions Daniel as subordinate to white people, at least recognises and seeks to convey the inequality created by structures of capitalism, colonialism and ablelism.

I don’t know how well this story fits into Bill’s discussion of the defining features of Gen 3 – Modernism and social realism – because the story isn’t Modernist and I think it’s romantic rather than realist. However Cottrell has largely been forgotten in analyses of Australian literature, which seems remiss when her time on her uncle’s station at Ularunda and on Dunk Island indelibly shaped her writing and her adventurous spirit. If these spotlights are about drawing attention to (still overlooked) women writers in Australian literature, Cottrell should be on the stage.