Summary

Ida Dorothy Ottley Cottrell (1902-1957), writer, was born on 16 July 1902 at Picton in New South Wales, daughter of Australian-born parents Walter Barwon Wilkinson, mine manager, and his wife Ida Constance, née Fletcher. When Dorothy was five, she contracted infantile paralysis and was thereafter confined to a wheelchair. Her parents later separated and Dorothy was raised by her grandmother at Picton, and later, in Toowoomba, then on her Fletcher uncles' stations, Elmina, near Charleville, and Ularunda, near Morven. While on the stations, she trained sheep and cattle dogs to draw her wheelchair. She was taught at home by governesses until about 1915, when she went to live with her aunt Lavinia Fletcher in Sydney, then in 1920 she went to live at Ularunda.

On 23 May 1922, at the Ann Street Presbyterian Church, Brisbane, she married Walter Mackenzie Cottrell, a bookkeeper at Ularunda. In February 1923 they went to Dunk Island where they lived with beachcomber, Edmund Banfield. In 1924 they travelled round New South Wales in a truck, selling odds and ends, returning to Ularunda in the winter where she started to write fiction.

To avoid "iniquitous taxation" on her American earnings, the Cottrells sailed for California on 19 October 1928. She published Earth Battle (Tharlane, in America) in 1930, depicting the difficulty in making a living from the outback. Dorothy and Walter Cottrell became American citizens in 1939 and from 1942 they lived in Florida. In the USA Cottrell proved to be a successful journalist and writer, especially of short fiction on Australian themes. She also published two children's books, Winks: His Book (1934) and Wilderness Orphan (1936) which was filmed. In 1953 Cottrell published The Silent Reefs, a mystery adventure set in the Caribbean. It was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post and in 1959 was made into a film. In 1954 the Cottrells returned to Queensland to manage Ularunda until 1956 when they returned to Homestead in Florida. It was here that Dorothy died of heart disease on 29 June 1957. She was survived by her husband and adopted son.