Dora Birtles

Dora Birtles (1903–1992, née Toll), was an Australian novelist, short-story writer, poet and travel writer.[1] She was the daughter of Albert Toll, founder of Toll Holdings, Australia’s largest logistics company.[2]

Life

Dora Toll was born in 1903 in Wickham, New South Wales, the sixth daughter of Albert Frederick Toll and Hannah (née Roberts).[3] She was ahead of her time in studying at the University of Sydney in a period when few women received a tertiary education. However, she was suspended in 1923 for a poem appearing in the literary magazine Hermes, which describes post-coital bliss. Her future husband poet and journalist Bert Birtles was expelled for a still more explicit poem describing their tryst on the roof of the university quadrangle.[4][5]

Birtles returned to Sydney University to take a degree in Oriental history and a diploma of education,[3] and then taught in Newcastle, New South Wales for a short time before travelling to Europe. Before the Second World War she was a member of the International Women's League Against War and Fascism and reported for the Newcastle Sun.[6]

Dora Birtles died on 28 January 1992 aged 88.[7]

Works

Birtles' first novel, Pioneer Shack was for children. It had been written in the 1930s but did not appear until 1947, after the publication of a novel for adults, The Overlanders (1946), which was also filmed in the same year. She also wrote another children's novel, Bonza the Bull (1949). Birtles wrote an account of a sea voyage from Newcastle to Singapore, North-West by North (1935) which became one of her most popular works. Her work has been the subject of feminist literary criticism.[8][9]

Birtles was the subject of a finalist portrait for the Archibald Prize of 1947, by Dora Toovey.[10]

Source materials

  • Moore, Deirdre (1996) Survivors of Beauty: memoirs of Dora and Bert Birtles (Croydon, NSW : Book Collectors' Society of Australia).
  • Birtles, Bert (1938) Exiles in the Aegean (London: Victor Gollancz). Experiences in pre-war Greece.

References

  1. ↑ Spender, Dale (1988), Writing A New World: Two Centuries of Australian Women Writers, Sydney, Allen & Unwin, p. 301.
  2. ↑ http://www.theherald.com.au/story/2891467/toll-holdings-newcastle-roots/
  3. 1 2 The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, eds Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (London: Batsford, 1990), p. 95.
  4. ↑ Barcan, Alan (2002) Radical Students: The Old Left at Sydney University, Melbourne University Press; Carlton South, pp. 27-28.
  5. ↑ Bert Birtles, Beauty, http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/beauty-432/
  6. ↑ Sage, Lorna. (1999), The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English(New York; Cambridge University Press), p. 62.
  7. ↑ IMDb biography. Retrieved 4 May 2015.
  8. ↑ Mills, Sara. (2003), Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism, London; Taylor & Francis.
  9. ↑ Cooper, J. E. (1987). Shaping meaning: Women's diaries, journals, and letters—The old and the new. In Women's studies international forum (Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 95-99). Pergamon.
  10. ↑ http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/1947/18981/

Australian Dictionary of Biography entry.

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