WEBVTT - Conversations with Cornesy - Lucy Sussex 0:00:00.080 --> 0:00:04.000 Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations. I had never heard of 0:00:04.680 --> 0:00:08.239 Mary Fortune, to my shame, because she was a very 0:00:08.240 --> 0:00:13.840 prominent author in the nineteenth century, wrote crime fiction, one 0:00:13.880 --> 0:00:17.000 of the first female writers to do so, if not 0:00:17.120 --> 0:00:21.120 the first, and it's a really interesting story. Her life 0:00:22.120 --> 0:00:25.440 unfolds in many ways. She gets married twice without getting 0:00:25.480 --> 0:00:28.760 divorced the first time, she goes to the goldfields, and 0:00:28.800 --> 0:00:32.600 she lives in that bahomium lifestyle of nineteenth century Melbourne 0:00:33.080 --> 0:00:36.519 in the literary world. Then her son plays out some 0:00:36.640 --> 0:00:41.280 of the crime stories that she actually wrote. There's a 0:00:41.280 --> 0:00:44.559 biography about Mary Fortune, and our next guest is one 0:00:44.560 --> 0:00:48.120 of the authors. Lucy Sussex, joins us. Lucy, thanks your time, 0:00:48.159 --> 0:00:51.280 thank you, thank you for having me. What a great name. 0:00:51.400 --> 0:00:52.879 Lucy Sussex. 0:00:54.000 --> 0:00:57.840 Contemplated that it's not quite as as as good a 0:00:57.920 --> 0:01:01.320 name as Mary Fortune, though, because when we started a 0:01:01.400 --> 0:01:04.760 search we thought it was like a pseudonym and it wasn't. 0:01:05.280 --> 0:01:07.759 Look, we'll talking about you in a bit more depth 0:01:07.840 --> 0:01:11.039 as we go on, but I look at your biography 0:01:11.080 --> 0:01:15.840 and you're so versatile. I mean, write fantasy and science fiction, 0:01:15.920 --> 0:01:19.959 you write children's books, you write nonfiction and true crime. 0:01:20.040 --> 0:01:24.480 As you're an editor, a viewer, you are a teacher. 0:01:24.760 --> 0:01:27.120 I mean, which of those genres do you? 0:01:27.520 --> 0:01:31.280 I guess it's I guess it's a hat because when 0:01:31.319 --> 0:01:33.800 I started off, I started off with doing a science 0:01:33.800 --> 0:01:37.440 fiction workshop and that got me into science fiction and 0:01:37.800 --> 0:01:43.240 very small field. But then somebody children's editor read one 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:46.120 of my science fiction stories and said, why don't you 0:01:46.200 --> 0:01:49.160 try writing for children? And I didn't get it right 0:01:49.240 --> 0:01:51.680 on the first attempt, but I got it right on 0:01:51.720 --> 0:01:54.400 the second, and that was my first book, first book. 0:01:55.520 --> 0:01:58.200 And then somebody asked me to write horror, and I thought, 0:01:58.280 --> 0:02:00.320 that is so not my thing, but I'll give to go. 0:02:01.680 --> 0:02:04.600 And then I got a job working for Stephen Knight. 0:02:04.880 --> 0:02:08.160 Because I trained as a librarian and the job market 0:02:08.240 --> 0:02:12.320 was a bit tight, I thought, let's go sideways. So 0:02:12.440 --> 0:02:15.520 I saw an ad for a researcher for Stephen Knight, 0:02:15.560 --> 0:02:18.600 who was a professor at Melbourne University who had grant money, 0:02:19.400 --> 0:02:23.400 and he was writing a history of Australian crime fiction, 0:02:23.480 --> 0:02:26.200 the first one ever done. And so I had this 0:02:26.280 --> 0:02:29.280 wonderful job by which I'd go off to the library 0:02:29.520 --> 0:02:33.000 and I just read all these vintage antique crime books 0:02:33.040 --> 0:02:35.519 and then report if there was anything interesting about them? 0:02:35.840 --> 0:02:37.680 I mean whether they were any good or whether they 0:02:37.720 --> 0:02:41.799 were really bad, but they were historically important. And one 0:02:41.840 --> 0:02:45.400 of the tasks he gave me I was, who is 0:02:45.440 --> 0:02:48.519 this person said to be Mary Fortune? Said to be 0:02:48.600 --> 0:02:52.040 a woman? Can you find out anything about her? And 0:02:52.080 --> 0:02:55.320 that's when the research started, and that got me into writing, 0:02:56.240 --> 0:02:59.680 firstly nonfiction and then true crime. 0:03:00.040 --> 0:03:03.760 There's so many questions come from that little response she 0:03:03.840 --> 0:03:06.200 gave me. Then we'll come to Mary Fortune in a second. 0:03:06.200 --> 0:03:09.320 But how do you write science fiction when you're not 0:03:09.320 --> 0:03:13.600 a scientist or you're not a aerospace engineer. How do 0:03:13.600 --> 0:03:14.840 you do that? Yeah? 0:03:14.919 --> 0:03:18.560 Well it helps to read New Scientist magazine because you 0:03:18.680 --> 0:03:23.600 good ideas. And then there's a three useful trick which HG. 0:03:23.720 --> 0:03:27.399 Wells pioneered. He wrote the time Machine, which is if 0:03:27.440 --> 0:03:31.880 this goes on, so you take a trend and in 0:03:32.000 --> 0:03:35.880 society and go if this continues and it gets worse, 0:03:36.040 --> 0:03:39.800 what's going to happen? And that's a really interesting trick. 0:03:40.080 --> 0:03:45.320 There's a US writer called Octavia Butler. She's dead now, 0:03:45.480 --> 0:03:48.160 but she wrote The Powerballs of the Sawer and she 0:03:48.240 --> 0:03:52.880 did this trick and it's really uncanny how it's how 0:03:52.880 --> 0:03:56.920 it's unfolding in the US like that right now. But 0:03:56.960 --> 0:03:59.080 the other thing is, if you don't have a science background, 0:03:59.160 --> 0:04:01.720 always have somebody someone to check your check to see 0:04:01.720 --> 0:04:03.720 whether you haven't made any hideous mistakes. 0:04:04.080 --> 0:04:07.600 Popular science magazine is the is the motivation for it. 0:04:07.920 --> 0:04:09.400 I used to get that, but I didn't feel like 0:04:09.480 --> 0:04:11.240 I had to write fiction science fiction. 0:04:12.200 --> 0:04:15.240 Oh well, I went to I went to this workshop 0:04:15.320 --> 0:04:19.640 with George Turner. It's on how to write science fiction. 0:04:19.720 --> 0:04:22.880 And Turner wrote The Sea in Summer, which is in 0:04:23.000 --> 0:04:26.360 nineteen eighty seven, which was a major climate change novel, 0:04:26.720 --> 0:04:29.440 and again he looked at climate change and thought, if 0:04:29.440 --> 0:04:34.240 this goes on, and but George sort of basically said, 0:04:34.279 --> 0:04:37.200 be your own critic, being rigorous, and that was a 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:40.800 really good, good way to good you know, you were 0:04:40.880 --> 0:04:42.839 learning from the best. 0:04:43.520 --> 0:04:46.520 So nineteen eighty seven he wrote that has how precient 0:04:46.680 --> 0:04:50.359 was and how how much of that fiction has come true? 0:04:50.880 --> 0:04:56.080 Well, he's got Melbourne, you know, it's inundated and the 0:04:56.160 --> 0:05:00.599 high rises. The US addition is called drowning to hours, 0:05:00.839 --> 0:05:05.640 and there's an unemployed underclass, and it's all really grim 0:05:05.720 --> 0:05:08.960 but it's still got but it's it's sort of life 0:05:09.000 --> 0:05:10.480 affirming if you under them what I mean. 0:05:11.240 --> 0:05:12.479 So you're born in New Zealand. 0:05:13.480 --> 0:05:19.200 Yeah, yeah, I'm a Kiri, but my parents were Australian 0:05:19.520 --> 0:05:24.279 and so my pretty much all of my grandparents and 0:05:24.360 --> 0:05:29.040 great grandparents were walking Melbourne at the same time as 0:05:29.120 --> 0:05:35.039 Mary Fortune was. So I learned to love nineteenth century 0:05:35.080 --> 0:05:38.960 Melbourne from her descriptions and her journalism and crime fiction 0:05:39.560 --> 0:05:42.719 of what the city was like, and that it's just 0:05:42.760 --> 0:05:45.599 a really good picture. And also she writes about the 0:05:45.600 --> 0:05:47.320 goldfields very vividly too. 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:49.400 What were your parents doing in New Zealand? 0:05:49.760 --> 0:05:52.960 Oh, dad got a job there, and I had a 0:05:52.960 --> 0:05:56.240 great grandmother who had emigrated to New Zealand in the 0:05:56.279 --> 0:06:00.400 eighteen nineties. Depression in Australia and Melbourne was really tough, 0:06:00.440 --> 0:06:02.719 So half the family went to Wa and half the 0:06:02.760 --> 0:06:03.960 family went to New Zealand. 0:06:04.560 --> 0:06:05.760 What did you What did your dad do? 0:06:06.880 --> 0:06:07.640 He taught French? 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:12.320 He taught French? Yeah, well romantic is that? Did he 0:06:12.720 --> 0:06:14.000 serve in France? Did he? 0:06:14.600 --> 0:06:18.400 No? He studied. He did a law degree at Melbourne 0:06:18.480 --> 0:06:21.640 Uni and discovered he hated the law and thought about 0:06:21.680 --> 0:06:24.880 what he did like doing, and then it was French. 0:06:25.000 --> 0:06:29.800 So he basically went for worked for a year teaching 0:06:29.960 --> 0:06:32.719 and then he got a he got a scholarship to 0:06:32.800 --> 0:06:36.160 go to France and study and to do a PhD. 0:06:37.200 --> 0:06:40.280 And so he became an academic and that took him 0:06:40.400 --> 0:06:42.039 all in all sorts of places. 0:06:42.360 --> 0:06:43.800 Did it rub off on you? 0:06:44.360 --> 0:06:46.680 I haven't quite. I haven't got I haven't got the 0:06:46.960 --> 0:06:51.479 foreign language gene. But my brother Rowley, who does who 0:06:51.560 --> 0:06:55.600 does radio for ABC, he's a Slavonic linguist and he 0:06:55.640 --> 0:06:59.200 can he can pick up a language very, very easily. 0:06:59.520 --> 0:07:01.000 He's got about five or six. 0:07:02.600 --> 0:07:05.680 So what age do you come back to Australia. 0:07:05.880 --> 0:07:09.039 As a teenager and dad got a job in far North. 0:07:08.920 --> 0:07:11.160 Queensland, Far North Queensland. 0:07:11.680 --> 0:07:12.560 Yeah, Townsville. 0:07:13.400 --> 0:07:15.560 You're a teenager in Townsville. What was it like? 0:07:17.240 --> 0:07:21.680 Well, it was I didn't like the climate. It was 0:07:21.800 --> 0:07:24.600 you know, when you've got enough problems being a teenager 0:07:24.640 --> 0:07:29.320 without moving house abruptly to an entirely different climate and 0:07:29.480 --> 0:07:35.360 a different place. And yeah. So and that's how I 0:07:35.400 --> 0:07:37.800 got into reading science fiction because I was in the 0:07:37.840 --> 0:07:41.880 library and you could read about really dark stuff like J. G. 0:07:42.080 --> 0:07:44.680 Beallard when there was a just there was a I 0:07:44.840 --> 0:07:47.120 was reading science fiction in the library because you could 0:07:47.160 --> 0:07:50.160 get out of your head and into another place. And 0:07:50.200 --> 0:07:53.840 that was what science fiction did, which was my early 0:07:53.880 --> 0:07:54.840 interest in it. 0:07:55.000 --> 0:07:59.680 Science fiction and horror. Though there's an impact on your mental. 0:07:59.360 --> 0:08:03.280 Health, I'd say it's quite bad. And being a teenager, 0:08:03.880 --> 0:08:06.920 I understand. I mean, I'm not a I'm not a 0:08:06.920 --> 0:08:10.880 splatter fan, but I like ghost stories. I mean there's 0:08:11.040 --> 0:08:15.760 really good Australian ghost stories and some New Zealand ones too. 0:08:16.200 --> 0:08:19.160 Lucy Sussex is my guest, folks. She is the co 0:08:19.240 --> 0:08:23.120 writer of a book called Outrageous Fortune about Mary Fortune. 0:08:23.120 --> 0:08:25.880 It's a true story about this lady who wrote crime 0:08:25.920 --> 0:08:29.800 and crime fiction in the nineteenth century Melbourne, but an 0:08:29.840 --> 0:08:32.680 interesting life she had before all of that. Back after 0:08:32.720 --> 0:08:35.280 the break, Welcome back to conversations, everybody. If you just 0:08:35.320 --> 0:08:39.120 tuned in, I'm speaking to Lucy Sussex, an author with 0:08:39.200 --> 0:08:41.800 a great name. That's not a student m isn't it. 0:08:42.360 --> 0:08:43.280 That's your real name? 0:08:43.320 --> 0:08:44.960 You didn't, Yep, that's my real name. 0:08:45.640 --> 0:08:49.920 It's a great name and a prolific author of very 0:08:50.240 --> 0:08:53.680 varying genres. But her book that we're talking about today 0:08:53.760 --> 0:08:57.440 is Outrageous Fortunes. It's the adventures of Mary Fortune, who 0:08:57.480 --> 0:09:02.600 was a crime writer in the tenth century. Melbourne. Tell 0:09:02.679 --> 0:09:06.120 us about this Mary Fortune. I mean she was she's 0:09:06.120 --> 0:09:08.120 born in Ireland. 0:09:08.960 --> 0:09:12.120 Yeah, she was born in Belfast in the eighteen thirties 0:09:12.840 --> 0:09:17.520 and her father father, her mother died after she was born, 0:09:17.760 --> 0:09:21.559 and her father went. He was traveling around Ireland I 0:09:21.640 --> 0:09:25.680 think were as working as a civil engineer, and during 0:09:25.679 --> 0:09:28.080 the famine they went, they moved, they went across the 0:09:28.440 --> 0:09:33.880 Atlantic to Quebec and he was working on the railways. 0:09:33.960 --> 0:09:38.240 And so she married a young so his name was Wilson's. 0:09:38.480 --> 0:09:42.080 You try doing any research and to anybody called Wilson, 0:09:42.240 --> 0:09:47.000 he was George Mary. It's really difficult to trace. But 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:51.439 she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune, which was a 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:55.400 much more distinctive name, and that's how she became Mary Fortune. 0:09:55.679 --> 0:10:00.640 And they had one son, and then her father, George. 0:10:01.360 --> 0:10:05.480 The eighteen fifty one gold Russian Melbourne and Victoria happened 0:10:05.480 --> 0:10:09.120 and that was huge although and people from all over 0:10:09.160 --> 0:10:12.760 the world immigrated. So he came down, came to Victoria, 0:10:12.840 --> 0:10:15.600 and after a couple of years she followed with her son. 0:10:15.840 --> 0:10:18.600 And the evidence is that there was trouble in her 0:10:18.640 --> 0:10:24.720 marriage and she took her child and ran and. 0:10:24.520 --> 0:10:25.520 So this is Mary's mother. 0:10:26.120 --> 0:10:29.120 Yeah, this is this is Mary Fortune and her son 0:10:29.240 --> 0:10:30.920 by Joseph Fortune. 0:10:31.240 --> 0:10:34.280 Okay, well I missed, I missed the part where she 0:10:34.320 --> 0:10:34.880 got married. 0:10:35.280 --> 0:10:38.240 Oh so so she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune. 0:10:38.840 --> 0:10:41.040 And then that was with that in candidate. 0:10:41.400 --> 0:10:44.720 Yeah, that was. That was that was in Quebec. And 0:10:44.760 --> 0:10:47.960 the trouble with Quebec was that divorce was difficult in 0:10:48.000 --> 0:10:52.000 the nineteenth century because so most people. So there's a 0:10:52.000 --> 0:10:54.680 lot of bigger me going on, which I'll get on too, 0:10:54.760 --> 0:10:58.360 but people just vanished and then turned up again. And 0:10:58.440 --> 0:11:04.080 so you know, hopped on a ship crossed so from 0:11:04.120 --> 0:11:12.000 you know, West Australia to South Australia and just conveniently 0:11:12.120 --> 0:11:14.600 forgot that they had a family and got married again. 0:11:14.840 --> 0:11:17.760 You know, this thing happened a lot. So she joined 0:11:17.760 --> 0:11:22.360 her father on the gold fields, and she later writes 0:11:22.400 --> 0:11:25.560 a memoir of the gold fields. He wasn't a digger, 0:11:25.640 --> 0:11:28.480 he was a he was a storekeeper by then, but 0:11:28.679 --> 0:11:30.640 he was a man in his fifties. It was probably 0:11:30.679 --> 0:11:36.200 too hard work for really hard physical work. And then 0:11:37.520 --> 0:11:38.880 the story gets really weird. 0:11:40.640 --> 0:11:45.720 She writes accounts of life on the gold fields yeah, 0:11:45.760 --> 0:11:49.520 and I suppose now it's a distant it's our distant history. 0:11:49.840 --> 0:11:53.720 We probably studied it at one stage. How did she 0:11:53.760 --> 0:11:55.120 see it? How did she portray it? 0:11:56.559 --> 0:12:00.120 She actually portrayed it. She was as a period of 0:12:00.240 --> 0:12:03.959 freedom because women in middle class, nice ladies in the 0:12:04.040 --> 0:12:07.840 nineteenth century and all of a sudden you're into this 0:12:09.160 --> 0:12:13.040 crater escape of people furiously digging. And she said it 0:12:13.080 --> 0:12:17.400 was so free because you didn't have to observe appearances 0:12:17.480 --> 0:12:23.760 so much, and some of the social strictures weren't applicable, 0:12:24.080 --> 0:12:28.160 and so she really liked living in the Australian colonies. 0:12:29.040 --> 0:12:33.120 And she was also pro, very much pro the Eureka stockage. 0:12:33.160 --> 0:12:37.920 She caught it, and of course it was pretty much right. 0:12:38.080 --> 0:12:41.960 She arrived in Melbourne the year after it happened, and 0:12:42.160 --> 0:12:45.280 she was writing. She was writing poetry and some of 0:12:45.280 --> 0:12:47.520 it was quite revolutionary, and she sent it to the 0:12:47.559 --> 0:12:50.559 local paper on the gold Fields and they printed it 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:54.760 and then they said, oh, under her initials m HF. 0:12:55.480 --> 0:12:58.760 And they said, oh, well, you know MHF will call 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:03.880 it at the office and at his earliest convenience, and 0:13:03.960 --> 0:13:06.640 so you know, she turns up in a quinnoline with 0:13:06.679 --> 0:13:11.319 a small child, and they say, oh, well, we were 0:13:11.360 --> 0:13:14.160 in need of a sub editor. We thought that MHF 0:13:14.400 --> 0:13:17.960 he might have suited. But of course not many female 0:13:18.040 --> 0:13:20.400 journalists at that stage, so she didn't get the job. 0:13:20.440 --> 0:13:23.240 Had she got it, she would have been a bit 0:13:23.320 --> 0:13:28.559 like Catherine Helen Spence, pioneering in that area area. But 0:13:28.600 --> 0:13:30.400 instead she turned into a crime writer. 0:13:30.920 --> 0:13:35.079 But in the meantime she remarries without having a divorce. 0:13:35.480 --> 0:13:38.280 She had a child before she remarried or subsequent. 0:13:38.440 --> 0:13:42.920 Yes, the year after she arrives in Australia, she has 0:13:42.960 --> 0:13:46.360 a child and we don't know who the father is, 0:13:46.760 --> 0:13:52.080 but anything could have happened on the goldfields and her 0:13:52.480 --> 0:13:55.839 eldest child died and so she called this child by 0:13:55.880 --> 0:13:58.600 the same name, George, and he grew up to be 0:13:58.640 --> 0:14:02.720 a career criminal. But when he was only two she 0:14:02.920 --> 0:14:06.480 married a policeman. She married a mounted trooper on the 0:14:06.520 --> 0:14:12.560 Australian Goldfield's called Percy Brett. They both lied about lied 0:14:12.679 --> 0:14:17.600 on the marriage certificate here about his age, and they 0:14:17.640 --> 0:14:22.320 both and she that she'd been married before and had children, 0:14:22.320 --> 0:14:24.480 which is something that you were supposed to fill out. 0:14:25.600 --> 0:14:28.800 My grandfather was an Anglican clergyman and in the early 0:14:28.920 --> 0:14:32.160 years of his He says that if he was conducting 0:14:32.200 --> 0:14:34.680 a marriage with people who are widowed, he would ask 0:14:34.720 --> 0:14:38.280 them to write in the you know, just when they 0:14:38.320 --> 0:14:42.000 were widowed and where, just to cover himself in case 0:14:42.040 --> 0:14:44.280 they might be in crust, they might be legal problem, 0:14:44.280 --> 0:14:47.720 because this sort of thing was absolutely rife and the colonies. 0:14:48.640 --> 0:14:51.560 You know, Daisy Baits, she made two big of his marriages. 0:14:51.840 --> 0:14:54.200 You know, she married Break morand and then she marries 0:14:54.240 --> 0:14:57.360 two other guys in quick succession. You know, it was 0:14:57.400 --> 0:15:01.040 just it just happened because people couldn't get divorced. But 0:15:01.320 --> 0:15:04.640 her marriage to Percy Brett doesn't last long. He probably 0:15:04.680 --> 0:15:07.120 found out her son was illegitimate or that she had 0:15:07.120 --> 0:15:10.280 a husband in Canada. But from him she got to 0:15:10.680 --> 0:15:13.000 know a lot about the police on the gold Fields, 0:15:13.000 --> 0:15:18.560 and she becomes fascinated by how they operated in the days. 0:15:18.960 --> 0:15:21.160 So she knows what it's like to be in the 0:15:21.240 --> 0:15:27.480 era before forensics and how they would catch what their 0:15:27.520 --> 0:15:30.440 lives were like, and the sort of things they did 0:15:30.480 --> 0:15:34.800 and how they caught criminals. And she's one of the 0:15:34.840 --> 0:15:38.560 few women in the nineteenth century with that knowledge. And 0:15:38.760 --> 0:15:41.680 eventually she came about ten years later, she comes to 0:15:41.760 --> 0:15:42.080 use it. 0:15:42.640 --> 0:15:45.960 But what sort of person was she? I mean, you're 0:15:45.960 --> 0:15:48.600 talking about the various times of the scrape she had 0:15:48.640 --> 0:15:51.800 with the police, like drunkenness and disorderly and the like. 0:15:52.240 --> 0:15:55.200 But at the same time she seems quite well educated 0:15:55.600 --> 0:16:00.160 and moves quite comfortably within a middle class of society. 0:16:00.640 --> 0:16:05.760 Well, her father wrote poetry, and we know that. And 0:16:06.440 --> 0:16:09.320 and yes, she knows French, she may know a little 0:16:09.320 --> 0:16:13.680 bit of she may know Latin. She can write in 0:16:13.720 --> 0:16:17.040 the voice of a male of the era quite convincingly. 0:16:17.840 --> 0:16:19.560 So did she Why did she feel she had to 0:16:19.560 --> 0:16:22.080 write in the voice of a male like some of 0:16:22.080 --> 0:16:23.600 the other great female authors. 0:16:25.240 --> 0:16:28.640 It was just sort of anonymity. Women was supposed to 0:16:28.680 --> 0:16:32.080 belong to the house and be domestic. That the angel 0:16:32.160 --> 0:16:36.560 in the house was the ideal, despite the fact that 0:16:36.720 --> 0:16:39.600 you know the most that the most powerful person in 0:16:39.640 --> 0:16:43.920 the British Empire was a woman, Queen Victoria. I mean, 0:16:43.920 --> 0:16:45.680 that was the ideal, But in fact, a lot of 0:16:45.720 --> 0:16:50.920 women would make extra money writing for writing fiction, like 0:16:51.000 --> 0:16:54.160 the Bronzes and like George George Eliott, who was really 0:16:54.200 --> 0:16:59.360 Mary Ann Evans. But Mary Fortune was writing police fiction 0:16:59.440 --> 0:17:02.240 and she was doing this in the first person, so 0:17:02.280 --> 0:17:04.520 She was probably the first woman to write in the 0:17:04.600 --> 0:17:10.280 voice of the police and her detective Mark Sinclair, and 0:17:10.680 --> 0:17:13.199 has the same voice in some of her just the 0:17:13.280 --> 0:17:17.880 rights woman centric journalism as well color pieces as they 0:17:17.960 --> 0:17:21.640 call it, and the voices are very similar. But it's 0:17:21.680 --> 0:17:25.840 someone who's very irreverent, who's got a black sense of humor, 0:17:26.400 --> 0:17:30.199 who's got guts, who's a little bit of a loner. 0:17:30.920 --> 0:17:35.040 So this is this is the main character of her stories. 0:17:35.200 --> 0:17:38.160 But also you can see the same persona in her 0:17:38.920 --> 0:17:46.080 when she's writing autogiographical pieces as well. And she doesn't 0:17:46.080 --> 0:17:51.520 mention that she's well, it's proven that she was had 0:17:51.640 --> 0:17:54.840 up sent to jail for being drunk in Melbourne. And 0:17:56.080 --> 0:17:59.760 you know, you know, if you'd had an illegitimate child, 0:18:00.080 --> 0:18:02.520 you have led a rough life on the gold fields, 0:18:03.119 --> 0:18:05.160 you know, you might you know, you might be given 0:18:05.200 --> 0:18:09.720 to drowning your sorrows now and then. And colonial alcohol 0:18:09.800 --> 0:18:14.119 is incredibly strong, so you know, she. 0:18:13.320 --> 0:18:15.600 She seems a bit of a loose lady to me. 0:18:15.720 --> 0:18:19.280 I mean it just without knowing it. I'm just from 0:18:19.320 --> 0:18:23.600 your descriptions, she seems rather loose with her morals. 0:18:24.640 --> 0:18:26.879 I don't know if you call that. I mean, she's 0:18:27.400 --> 0:18:31.240 of course, Well, how did you call it? I don't know. 0:18:31.359 --> 0:18:34.680 I mean sort of bohemian is how is how she's 0:18:34.960 --> 0:18:38.080 a couple of people described it, and. 0:18:39.520 --> 0:18:42.040 That means, well, there's a certain useless of morality. 0:18:42.560 --> 0:18:45.280 Oh yeah, but I mean she might not have had 0:18:45.359 --> 0:18:49.399 an illegitimate child by choice. Because also she writes about rape, 0:18:49.480 --> 0:18:52.800 including gang rape on the gold Fields. And she's the 0:18:52.840 --> 0:18:56.440 only nineteenth century writer I know who does write about 0:18:56.520 --> 0:19:00.960 gang who women writer who does write about it? And 0:19:00.960 --> 0:19:02.800 and this is an era when women are supposed to 0:19:02.840 --> 0:19:05.680 be mider class women supposed to be so delicate and 0:19:05.800 --> 0:19:09.240 high mind to not know about such things. But she 0:19:09.400 --> 0:19:13.199 can because she's got the persona of a cop, and 0:19:13.240 --> 0:19:19.000 so she can write about these things. But explicitly, I 0:19:19.040 --> 0:19:21.800 think say that she's a free spirit and a bit wild. 0:19:22.800 --> 0:19:25.280 And yeah, she should have been born in the nineteen sixties. 0:19:25.280 --> 0:19:26.360 She could have been a hippie. 0:19:26.640 --> 0:19:27.800 It sounds like she was fun. 0:19:28.600 --> 0:19:30.560 I think she was. She comes across, as you know, 0:19:31.160 --> 0:19:36.760 and she addresses you directly, and you think, now you 0:19:36.800 --> 0:19:40.160 could here's someone who had been really interesting. And if 0:19:40.200 --> 0:19:42.200 they took you on a guide a tour of Melbourne, 0:19:42.280 --> 0:19:44.160 nineteenth century of Melbourne, it would have been one hell 0:19:44.200 --> 0:19:44.680 of a tour. 0:19:45.720 --> 0:19:49.120 Lucy's Sussex is my guest co author of a book 0:19:49.160 --> 0:19:53.120 about Mary Fortune called Outrageous Fortunes. Back shortly, Welcome back 0:19:53.119 --> 0:19:55.920 to conversations, everybody, Now, if you've just tuned in, we're 0:19:56.000 --> 0:20:01.440 talking to an academic lady, an author. Right, many various 0:20:01.480 --> 0:20:06.320 genres and I've just read them. Fantasy, science fiction, children's 0:20:06.320 --> 0:20:10.600 and teenage writing, nonfiction, true crime. Which of those do 0:20:10.600 --> 0:20:13.000 you prefer, Lucy Sussex. 0:20:14.200 --> 0:20:17.320 I get. I enjoy writing all of them because I 0:20:17.440 --> 0:20:21.200 enjoy writing and I like but I like researching, and 0:20:20.880 --> 0:20:25.560 that's partly why I got into Mary Fortune, because of 0:20:25.600 --> 0:20:30.800 being a researcher. And my co writer Megan Brown, she's 0:20:30.840 --> 0:20:34.640 also a searcher, so we had much time in archives. 0:20:35.040 --> 0:20:38.840 It sounded as she was Mary Fortune was difficult to research. 0:20:38.960 --> 0:20:41.120 There am I writing saying. 0:20:40.920 --> 0:20:45.320 That, yes, started off with just the name and that 0:20:45.520 --> 0:20:48.920 the suggestion that she was a woman. But luckily she'd 0:20:48.960 --> 0:20:53.320 written this autobiographical fiction for the Australian Journal, which was 0:20:54.240 --> 0:20:58.040 all over Australia. It had a very wide distribution and 0:20:58.119 --> 0:21:03.440 that was It lasted in the eighteen sixty five until 0:21:03.480 --> 0:21:07.520 the nineteen until nearly the Night until the nineteen sixties. 0:21:07.840 --> 0:21:12.560 She wrote for that and so initially she was so 0:21:12.600 --> 0:21:16.720 she began writing poetry, but then she but she also 0:21:16.760 --> 0:21:21.720 had these autographographical pieces and from that you could find 0:21:21.760 --> 0:21:24.919 out quite a lot about her. She wrote under the 0:21:24.920 --> 0:21:29.560 pseudonym but for about the Goldfields quite vividly, and you 0:21:29.600 --> 0:21:33.840 could have pis things together. And the real clue to 0:21:34.080 --> 0:21:39.480 her name was that she arrives arriving in Melbourne in 0:21:39.520 --> 0:21:43.119 eighteen fifty five with a small boy who's never named, 0:21:43.400 --> 0:21:47.320 but in a piece of journalism about what she did 0:21:47.359 --> 0:21:51.439 on Christmas Day in eighteen sixty eight, she's wandering around 0:21:51.520 --> 0:21:55.160 Melbourne with another boy and she says he's never seen 0:21:55.160 --> 0:22:00.000 the sun before, such as the sea before. And I thought, okay, well, 0:22:00.000 --> 0:22:03.359 well maybe if he can't be her, can't be her son, 0:22:04.240 --> 0:22:06.520 that first child, So it must have been the other. 0:22:07.240 --> 0:22:10.800 Maybe you know, she had another child, Maybe she remarried. 0:22:10.880 --> 0:22:14.160 Maybe that first child died, because why would a boy 0:22:14.280 --> 0:22:17.960 not be with his mother on Christmas Day? So I 0:22:18.000 --> 0:22:22.560 went looking through the microfilmed births, deaths and marriages, and 0:22:22.640 --> 0:22:27.399 I found a little boy called George's Fortune, who died 0:22:28.600 --> 0:22:32.040 in Central Victoria in eighteen fifty eight and his mother 0:22:32.119 --> 0:22:35.480 was given as Mary hed On, a fortune born in Belfast, 0:22:36.440 --> 0:22:39.840 and from that I had her father's name, her mother's 0:22:39.920 --> 0:22:44.080 name when she got married, and that was that was 0:22:44.359 --> 0:22:46.359 and that was the first time we had her full name. 0:22:47.240 --> 0:22:49.639 And then you could go on from there. You know, 0:22:49.680 --> 0:22:51.960 you had to do a bibliography, which was. 0:22:53.280 --> 0:22:55.760 How long does it hell does it take to pour 0:22:56.119 --> 0:22:59.560 through all of that stuff, those records? How long does 0:22:59.600 --> 0:23:03.040 it take you to find something like the actual name? 0:23:03.160 --> 0:23:06.200 And is that a Eureka moment for you? Well? 0:23:06.440 --> 0:23:10.359 Is that was one afternoon which we had the Eureka moment, 0:23:10.440 --> 0:23:15.119 but found out she wrote over five hundred stories and 0:23:15.240 --> 0:23:16.800 so you had to do a list of that. Then 0:23:16.800 --> 0:23:18.399 you had to read them, and Megan and I had 0:23:18.400 --> 0:23:22.320 to read them at least twice. And then quite late 0:23:22.400 --> 0:23:25.480 in the re search we found via trove, you know, 0:23:25.640 --> 0:23:30.200 wonderful trove, long may it be funded. We found out 0:23:30.240 --> 0:23:34.960 there was another pseudonym and another ninety items. So we 0:23:35.080 --> 0:23:39.160 just had to stop writing and start reading again, and 0:23:39.359 --> 0:23:43.040 you know, that was another Eureka moment. But there was 0:23:43.080 --> 0:23:46.200 a lot of hard slogging and going down and going 0:23:46.240 --> 0:23:49.919 down rabbit holes and not finding anything there and it 0:23:49.960 --> 0:23:54.480 took about it took it took decades really to get it. 0:23:54.600 --> 0:23:57.080 And the thing that made the difference was that the 0:23:57.119 --> 0:24:03.280 digitization of newspapers and records and censuses so that you 0:24:03.280 --> 0:24:07.159 could actually look up information. And we're working during the 0:24:07.160 --> 0:24:10.240 pandemic and it couldn't leave the house, but you know, 0:24:10.280 --> 0:24:16.480 you could still get hold of the sense. The Ulster 0:24:16.960 --> 0:24:21.880 Historical Society of Records have just gone online and wow, 0:24:22.440 --> 0:24:27.639 so I could visit, So I could visit Belfast and 0:24:27.320 --> 0:24:32.320 in virtuality, if not actuality, and find out stuff. 0:24:32.880 --> 0:24:35.879 This might seem like a rude question, Lucy, what do 0:24:35.920 --> 0:24:40.920