Different Leaves From Dunk Island: The Banfields, Dorothy Cottrell and The Singing Gold

Abstract

Though she is scarcely remembered now, the Australian popular novelist and journalist Dorothy Cottrell had a large following among Englishspeaking readers between the late 1920s and the 1950s. Her first novel, the bestseller The Singing Gold (1928), was published in book form in the United States and London and serialised in the Sydney Mail, where it drew extravagant praise from Mary Gilmore. For this novel about a young couple who go to live on an almost uninhabited island off the North Queensland coast, Dorothy drew extensively on her own experience in 1923 when she and her husband Walter did their "Bunk to Dunk," the island of the famous "Beachcomber," E.J. Banfield.