Name Dora Birtles | Role Novelist | |
Books The Overlanders, North-West by North | ||
Dora Birtles (1903–1992, née Toll), was an Australian novelist, short-story writer, poet and travel writer. She was the daughter of Albert Toll, founder of Toll Holdings, Australia’s largest logistics company.
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Life
Dora Toll was born in 1903 in Wickham, New South Wales, the sixth daughter of Albert Frederick Toll and Hannah (née Roberts). 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.
Birtles returned to Sydney University to take a degree in Oriental history and a diploma of education, 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.
Dora Birtles died on 28 January 1992 aged 88.
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.
Birtles was the subject of a finalist portrait for the Archibald Prize of 1947, by Dora Toovey.