The Space of Biography: Writing on Olive Cotton

Abstract

I didn't want to begin with a death but found no way around it. For some reason I am not one of those who can write well on the living. The Australian modernist photographer Olive Cotton, who is my subject, died in 2003 but it wasn't until the death of her husband, Ross McInerney, seven years later that I felt able to start writing her biography. I had been preparing myself as best I could, being careful not to take any liberties with biographical material I had been given or had already gathered. Ross's death was not unexpected (he was a lifelong smoker who developed lung cancer at the age of ninety-one) but I was shocked by the strength and immediacy of its impact on my biographical project. It was electrifying. All of a sudden the key had been turned, the door opened and in I went to a space that previously did not - could not - exist. Janet Frame explains this transformative experience best in her autobiography The Envoy from Mirror City when she says, 'writing of the dead is different for the dead have surrendered their story'. And so the day after Ross's burial in a bush-circled cemetery in country New South Wales, I assumed a new role - as a storyteller, as Olive Cotton's biographer.