A way with the fairies: the lost story of sculptor Ola Cohn

An autobiography edited by Barbara Lemon.
Published by RW Strugnell with assistance from the State Library of Victoria.

Ola Cohn was a pioneer of modernist sculpture in Australia and her Fairies’ Tree in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens has delighted generations of children.

A way with the fairies brings Cohn’s extraordinary story back to life: from the Bendigo School of Mines to London’s Royal College of Art, from the chaos of Cohn’s East Melbourne studio to the quiet of the Fitzroy Gardens, where she lovingly carved her fairy characters for the children of Melbourne.

Barbara Lemon is a historian with an interest in biography and oral history. She was awarded a Creative Fellowship at the State Library in 2010 to transcribe and edit Ola Cohn’s original unpublished autobiographical manuscript, now published in this book.