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Our copy from a North Queensland book fair , Esther Kelly early owner .
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Written and illustrated by Dorothy M. Langsford , this 1922 novel is a love story which
tells of the aftermath of WWl and includes
the emotive poem , “COO-EE”, by J. H. Chinner, in which
Australians were calling
from the Dardanelles and Gallipoli to come and join the fight . Set to music, the poem was frequently
sung during "the anxious days of the Great War" at recruiting meetings .
The plot tells how John Lansbury, of Adelaide , at
first studied art before
taking up medicine for four years ; just before
the final examination , war broke
out in 1914. Off to fight he went
, two years in the Light Horse , and
returned home minus an arm , wounded at Villers
Bretonneux , his medical career blown away
in the process .
His
father dead , his mother having died while he was at war and his brother , Bob , killed at Gallipoli, he sets
off on foot with a swag for the small
country town of Glenowie , his birthplace, to paint . In a scrubbed out house he settles down and , with his left arm, paints
the surrounding bush.
One day in the “forest” along comes an
attractive girl in her early twenties , Cooee , who tells him he must be the unfortunate victim of the
Glenowie gossipers –the artist. Over the coming
days he meets her farming family and sees her
riding boldly across the countryside on horseback. Lansbury rescues and buys a fox terrier from a tramp who was mistreating the animal with the grand name, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig , also called the worst general of WWl.
Cooee, it seems , is something of a tomboy as one illustration shows her up a gumtree , John threatening to climb up after her if she does not come down .
He and Cooee are brought together fighting a bushfire in which she staggers, is caught by John , and he
berates her for wearing a muslin dress which caught alight . There is a drought
; he and Cooee work together to brace a broken leg with bits of
timber. In a nightmare, John dreams of the war and the incident in which he was wounded in the shoulder resulting in the loss of his arm. The new Glenowie parson takes a shine to Cooee, plunging
the artist into gloom.
However, John and Cooee are eventually bound together in wedlock. Just before the
happy event, a telegram arrives from
London saying a highly praised painting by John, The Rising Sun , had been accepted by the
Royal Academy.
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| Cooee and John |
Author Langsford , born Mintaro , South Australia , in 1896, died at Mitcham , Victoria, in 1992. She wrote about 13 books and her work was serialised in the Adelaide Chronicle in the l930s.
