In Japan she watches a carp-shaped kite, which looks “as if it were swimming in the air”. Cotton mentions a Chinese legend in which a carp swims upstream, becomes a dragon and flies to heaven. The Japanese aesthetic fed her blossoming art. (Anne’s daughter Jo Bertini also became a painter.) Some subconscious force pushed Cotton to derail her ambition by marrying a diplomat and living miserably in Seoul, before escaping with her son for a hard but satisfying life in Tokyo. To Eve’s displeasure, both her daughters would become acclaimed visual artists, with Anne Ferguson working as a sculptor. So Cotton had to leave, first for the University of Sydney and night life-drawing classes. As she writes after a boy drowns, “Joy comes with teeth.” She was wounded – “a crater that never healed” – by the death of her cousin Tony, while flying a helicopter in Vietnam.
Her early life is remembered as a series of near-death illnesses, accidents, assaults and “experiments”: making a bomb, smashing Anne’s doll with a hammer, throwing sticks at a bull, spitting beer on drinkers from a hotel roof, filling watering cans with cement, painting the clothed body of her adored brother, Robert, with the pleasure of “twirl the brush in the concave shell of his ear”. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morningĪs a child, Cotton was also determined to be unhappy, as she recalls with ruthless comic flair. In Cotton’s view, she dedicated herself to being the wife of a public man, with the “fighting mindset of a perfectionist determined to be unhappy”. On their Oberon property at the frosty edge of the Blue Mountains, Eve was “one of the most successful sheep breeders in the Southern Hemisphere”, said her obituary. She sent them to boarding school when Cotton was four years old, to be near a hospital when her elder sister, Anne, needed eye surgery. As a mother to two daughters and a son, Eve judged her girls as she had been judged, on looks, clothes and marriages – “and we both lost in the equation”.
She gave up the piano to marry a handsome, charismatic local boy, Robert Cotton, who would become a Liberal senator and a diplomat. Growing up in Broken Hill, Eve had her own obstacles – a drunk father and a “beautiful, easy” sister who overshadowed her.
Her mother is her main problem, and she portrays Eve Cotton as a vivid nemesis, wryly quoting Shirley Hazzard’s letter of condolence about “this beloved and delightful woman”. As a girl Cotton is angry, stubborn and rebellious, swimming away from home as hard as she can. Swimming Home falls into halves of different tone and direction.