Swimming Home (Judy Cotton, Black Inc.)

Judy Cotton is an internationally celebrated visual artist who has work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Australia. Her father, Sir Robert Cotton, was a federal politician and diplomat who established the timber industry in Oberon, NSW. Swimming Home is much more than a political biography or artist’s travelogue—though it does detail Cotton’s time spent in South Korea, Japan and New York—as it delves beneath the surface of public persona into private life. It is a story of belonging and searching, mothers and daughters, siblings, expectations and defiance. The Cotton family history is unravelled through vignettes separated by time periods, but the chronology is loose and shifting, as it must be for the book’s conversational tone and lyrical style to shine. We piece together intersecting life stories as people break apart and come back together: grandmother Ollie isolated in Broken Hill; an outcast aunt in Papua New Guinea; mother Eve as an exacting and dedicated sheep farmer in Oberon; the author herself experiencing self-imposed exile and homecoming. While Swimming Home is not focused on Cotton’s professional practice, it shows evidence of an artist’s eye in its stunning visual imagery and observations of landscapes and people. A vivid memoir and a complex history of politics, settlement and displacement (and in sharing her family’s story, the author is not ignorant to the larger colonial displacement taking place in the country that she so beautifully and lovingly depicts), Swimming Home will appeal to readers interested in history, art, politics and compelling life stories.

Portia Lindsay is an owner of and book buyer for The Book Nest Mudgee.

Category: Reviews