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 Her unpublished novel 'Wheel-Rhyme’ contains a description of 'Signor’ Rubbo’s nude life class attended by students of both sexes.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 bookeeper, 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.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan Note: Working from Ross, Barbara, articles in 'Voices' [Canberra, ACT], 1991-2.

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007