Why I love biographical dictionaries

One sentence, from the entry about writer Ethel Anderson (1883-1958) in the Australian Dictionary of Biography online, written by Martha Rutledge:

"Somewhat formidable in later life, Ethel became quite deaf and brandished an immense, silver ear-trumpet, adorned with chiffon to match her dresses."

Somewhat formidable, indeed!

Conference: When the Soldiers Return

The conference ‘When the Soldiers Return’ will be held in Australia at the University of Queensland, St Lucia Campus, 28-30 November 2007. This conference will bring together scholars investigating the legacy of war, its effects on the broader society and culture, and the central role returned soldiers play in these processes.

Check out just some of the papers on the program that deal with disability (and there are surely others, but these titles stuck out for me):

Sandy McFarlane and Keith Horsley, "Florence Nightingale: A Sufferer of a Post-Deployment Syndrome"

Margaret Goldswain, "The War-Damaged Soldier in Australia after the Great War"

Melanie Oppenheimer, "'Fated to a life of suffering': Graythwaite, the Australian Red Cross, and Returned Soldiers, 1916-1939"

Keith Horsley and Sandy McFarlane, "Post-Deployment Syndromes Following Wars in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries"

Kristy Muir, "'There were no ticker tape parades for us': Homecomings of Veterans with Mental Health Problems"

Jim Porteous, "Rehabilitation of Injured or Ill Australian Defence Force Members"

Jen Hawksley, "Histories from the Asylum: 'The Unknown Patient'"

Kerry Neale, "'Without the Faces of Men': The Return of Facially Disfigured Australian Veterans from the Great War"

Marina Larsson, "'The Part We Do Not See': Disabled Australian Soldiers and Family Caregiving after World War I"

Stephen Clarke, "The Long Shadow of War: The New Zealand Experience of 'Burnt-Out Diggers' during the 1920s and 1930s"

Curious to learn more about any of these projects? The program (linked above) includes abstracts for all of them.

Illustration above: a stamp that promotes Esperanto as a way to end war, with a simple illustration in green of a uniformed man on crutches; from the 1920s, I think? (Lost the cite. Bad historian.)

July 16: Dorothy Cottrell (1902-1957)

Certainly I would like to be able to walk, but if the good fairy of old stories offered me the one gift, the ability to walk would not be the thing I would ask for. More years with my husband than I may normally expect, the ability to write better--a dozen things--would come before it.

--Dorothy Cottrell

Ever heard of this Australian writer? I hadn't, but she was born 105 years ago today. She used a wheelchair from age 6, after surviving polio.

Cottrell's life story reads like some of the adventures and children's tales she would later write: as a little girl on her uncle's sheep farm near Toowoomba, she taught the sheep and working dogs to pull her wheelchair like a chariot. She also learned to shoot a hunting rifle, and swim, and drive a car. At 20 she married, secretly, and traveled with her bookkeeper husband around Australia. In 1928 the Cottrells moved to California, and in 1942 to Florida. Dorothy wrote popular fiction, which funded her travels, and some of her books were made into movies. It is said that she would hop a ride on any ship that would accept her with her chair, and thus made her way around the Caribbean she loved.

This month, the rare books collection at the Monash University Library has a display on Australian Women Writers, 1900-1950, and Cottrell is among the featured authors.

June 17: Henry Lawson (1867-1922)

Get some sympathy and comfort from the chum who knows you best,
That your sorrows won't run over in the presence of the rest;
There's a chum that you can go to when you feel inclined to whine,
He'll declare your coat is tidy and he'll say: 'Just look at mine!'
Though you may be patched all over he will say it doesn't show,
And he'll swear it can't be noticed when your pants begin to go.

--a stanza from Henry Lawson's "When Your Pants Begin to Go" (1892)

Born 140 years ago today, Australian poet and author Henry Lawson (pictured at right, a smiling man with an abundant mustache, wearing a suit). He began to lose his hearing following an ear infection at age 9; at 14, he was completely deaf, and left school. He worked on the railway and lived with his mother, who ran a small newspaper in Sydney. His first poem and first short story were published in his mother's newspaper. In the early 1890s, he wrote for a Brisbane newspaper, the Boomerang. He traveled Australia, worked as a sheep shearer, and hung around with Banjo Paterson, collecting material for his writing, which was popular in its day and is still prized and studied as a record of Australian bush life in the late 1800s. Lawson married and had two children before 1900, and taught briefly at a Maori school in New Zealand with his wife, Bertha.

Things turned for Lawson after he separated from his wife in 1902. His alcoholism became a problem in keeping a job; he was in jail and hospitals a good bit; he survived a suicide attempt with serious injuries, and was sometimes seen begging in the streets of Sydney. Friends found him a job and took care of him when he could no longer work; he died after a stroke, in 1922, at the age of 55. The huge state funeral that followed was the first one given for an Australian writer.

Biographies of this deaf balladeer and journalist include Colin Roderick's Henry Lawson: A Life (Harper Collins 1999), and Manning Clark, Henry Lawson: The Man and the Legend (Melbourne University Press 1995). Some poems by Lawson are online here, and here (not open-access).

December 11: Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941) and Matilda Ann Aston (1873-1947)

Two disability biographies today: this date marks the birthday of astronomer Annie Jump Cannon, born on this date in 1863, and of writer/educator Matilda Ann "Tilly" Aston, born on this date in 1873.

Annie Jump Cannon (portrait at right) was born in Dover, Delaware, where, as a girl, she learned the names of constellations from her mother. She enrolled at Wellesley to study physics and astronomy, but after her graduation in 1884, she went home for ten years to care for her dying mother. During that decade, she caught scarlet fever, and became deaf. (She used a hearing aid in later life.) Eventually, she returned to school, to do graduate work in astronomy at Radcliffe College. In 1896, she began working for Edward Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory, examining photographic plates. She started as one of Pickering's "computers"--women hired to do the tedious but crucial calculations of size and position of stars. She wasn't the only deaf woman working at the Observatory at the time; Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921), head of the Department of Photographic Photometry, had a similar story of adult-onset deafness and a career studying the stars. (December 12 is the 85th anniversary of Leavitt's death.)

In 1911, Cannon became curator of astronomical photographs at the observatory, and editor of the Henry Draper Catalogue (which listed the spectral classes of 350,000 stars). In 1938, she was finally given an official Harvard appointment (she was 74 at the time). Cannon died in 1941, in Cambridge, and her papers are in the Harvard University Archives. An Annie J. Cannon Prize is given by the American Astronomical Society to a young woman astronomer. There are craters on the moon named for Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

Matilda Ann "Tilly" Aston (portrait at left) was born at Carisbrook, Victoria, Australia, the youngest of eight children. She was born with low vision, and by age 7 was considered totally blind. She was sent to the Victorian Asylum and School for the Blind in 1882, where she learned braille. Aston studied briefly at the University of Melbourne (she's considered the first blind student enrolled at an Australian university), but she found too few braille texts to support her studies. So, in 1894, Aston founded the Victorian Association for Blind Writers (later Victorian Braille Library) and the Association for the Advancement of the Blind. Her first three books (Maiden Verses, The Woolinappers, and The Straight Goer) were published between 1901 and 1908. (She would publish eight books of verse in all.)

In 1913, Aston became head of the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind (an appointment that was mocked as "the blind teaching the blind"). She lobbied for free public transit, state pensions, and voting rights for blind Australians. She also edited, for many years, A Book of Opals, a Braille magazine that was sent to Chinese mission schools (there must be a journal article there), and corresponded with other Esperanto proponents around the world. The Memoirs of Tilly Aston: Australia's Blind Poet Author and Philanthropist (1946) appeared in print the year before her death from cancer. In the Kings Domain gardens in Melbourne, there is a Tilly Aston Bell--it rings if you run your hand across its Braille inscription. A few months ago, an audio interpretation feature was added, explaining the bell and Aston's life story.