Speaker 1: Hi, everyone, Welcome to conversations. I had never heard of
Speaker 1: Mary Fortune, to my shame, because she was a very
Speaker 1: prominent author in the nineteenth century, wrote crime fiction, one
Speaker 1: of the first female writers to do so, if not
Speaker 1: the first, and it's a really interesting story. Her life
Speaker 1: unfolds in many ways. She gets married twice without getting
Speaker 1: divorced the first time, she goes to the goldfields, and
Speaker 1: she lives in that bahomium lifestyle of nineteenth century Melbourne
Speaker 1: in the literary world. Then her son plays out some
Speaker 1: of the crime stories that she actually wrote. There's a
Speaker 1: biography about Mary Fortune, and our next guest is one
Speaker 1: of the authors. Lucy Sussex, joins us. Lucy, thanks your time,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you for having me. What a great name.
Speaker 1: Lucy Sussex.
Speaker 2: Contemplated that it's not quite as as as good a
Speaker 2: name as Mary Fortune, though, because when we started a
Speaker 2: search we thought it was like a pseudonym and it wasn't.
Speaker 1: Look, we'll talking about you in a bit more depth
Speaker 1: as we go on, but I look at your biography
Speaker 1: and you're so versatile. I mean, write fantasy and science fiction,
Speaker 1: you write children's books, you write nonfiction and true crime.
Speaker 1: As you're an editor, a viewer, you are a teacher.
Speaker 1: I mean, which of those genres do you?
Speaker 3: I guess it's I guess it's a hat because when
Speaker 3: I started off, I started off with doing a science
Speaker 3: fiction workshop and that got me into science fiction and
Speaker 3: very small field. But then somebody children's editor read one
Speaker 3: of my science fiction stories and said, why don't you
Speaker 3: try writing for children? And I didn't get it right
Speaker 3: on the first attempt, but I got it right on
Speaker 3: the second, and that was my first book, first book.
Speaker 3: And then somebody asked me to write horror, and I thought,
Speaker 3: that is so not my thing, but I'll give to go.
Speaker 3: And then I got a job working for Stephen Knight.
Speaker 3: Because I trained as a librarian and the job market
Speaker 3: was a bit tight, I thought, let's go sideways. So
Speaker 3: I saw an ad for a researcher for Stephen Knight,
Speaker 3: who was a professor at Melbourne University who had grant money,
Speaker 3: and he was writing a history of Australian crime fiction,
Speaker 3: the first one ever done. And so I had this
Speaker 3: wonderful job by which I'd go off to the library
Speaker 3: and I just read all these vintage antique crime books
Speaker 3: and then report if there was anything interesting about them?
Speaker 3: I mean whether they were any good or whether they
Speaker 3: were really bad, but they were historically important. And one
Speaker 3: of the tasks he gave me I was, who is
Speaker 3: this person said to be Mary Fortune? Said to be
Speaker 3: a woman? Can you find out anything about her? And
Speaker 3: that's when the research started, and that got me into writing,
Speaker 3: firstly nonfiction and then true crime.
Speaker 1: There's so many questions come from that little response she
Speaker 1: gave me. Then we'll come to Mary Fortune in a second.
Speaker 1: But how do you write science fiction when you're not
Speaker 1: a scientist or you're not a aerospace engineer. How do
Speaker 1: you do that? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Well it helps to read New Scientist magazine because you
Speaker 3: good ideas. And then there's a three useful trick which HG.
Speaker 3: Wells pioneered. He wrote the time Machine, which is if
Speaker 3: this goes on, so you take a trend and in
Speaker 3: society and go if this continues and it gets worse,
Speaker 3: what's going to happen? And that's a really interesting trick.
Speaker 3: There's a US writer called Octavia Butler. She's dead now,
Speaker 3: but she wrote The Powerballs of the Sawer and she
Speaker 3: did this trick and it's really uncanny how it's how
Speaker 3: it's unfolding in the US like that right now. But
Speaker 3: the other thing is, if you don't have a science background,
Speaker 3: always have somebody someone to check your check to see
Speaker 3: whether you haven't made any hideous mistakes.
Speaker 1: Popular science magazine is the is the motivation for it.
Speaker 1: I used to get that, but I didn't feel like
Speaker 1: I had to write fiction science fiction.
Speaker 3: Oh well, I went to I went to this workshop
Speaker 3: with George Turner. It's on how to write science fiction.
Speaker 3: And Turner wrote The Sea in Summer, which is in
Speaker 3: nineteen eighty seven, which was a major climate change novel,
Speaker 3: and again he looked at climate change and thought, if
Speaker 3: this goes on, and but George sort of basically said,
Speaker 3: be your own critic, being rigorous, and that was a
Speaker 3: really good, good way to good you know, you were
Speaker 3: learning from the best.
Speaker 1: So nineteen eighty seven he wrote that has how precient
Speaker 1: was and how how much of that fiction has come true?
Speaker 3: Well, he's got Melbourne, you know, it's inundated and the
Speaker 3: high rises. The US addition is called drowning to hours,
Speaker 3: and there's an unemployed underclass, and it's all really grim
Speaker 3: but it's still got but it's it's sort of life
Speaker 3: affirming if you under them what I mean.
Speaker 1: So you're born in New Zealand.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I'm a Kiri, but my parents were Australian
Speaker 3: and so my pretty much all of my grandparents and
Speaker 3: great grandparents were walking Melbourne at the same time as
Speaker 3: Mary Fortune was. So I learned to love nineteenth century
Speaker 3: Melbourne from her descriptions and her journalism and crime fiction
Speaker 3: of what the city was like, and that it's just
Speaker 3: a really good picture. And also she writes about the
Speaker 3: goldfields very vividly too.
Speaker 1: What were your parents doing in New Zealand?
Speaker 3: Oh, dad got a job there, and I had a
Speaker 3: great grandmother who had emigrated to New Zealand in the
Speaker 3: eighteen nineties. Depression in Australia and Melbourne was really tough,
Speaker 3: So half the family went to Wa and half the
Speaker 3: family went to New Zealand.
Speaker 1: What did you What did your dad do?
Speaker 3: He taught French?
Speaker 1: He taught French? Yeah, well romantic is that? Did he
Speaker 1: serve in France? Did he?
Speaker 3: No? He studied. He did a law degree at Melbourne
Speaker 3: Uni and discovered he hated the law and thought about
Speaker 3: what he did like doing, and then it was French.
Speaker 3: So he basically went for worked for a year teaching
Speaker 3: and then he got a he got a scholarship to
Speaker 3: go to France and study and to do a PhD.
Speaker 3: And so he became an academic and that took him
Speaker 3: all in all sorts of places.
Speaker 1: Did it rub off on you?
Speaker 3: I haven't quite. I haven't got I haven't got the
Speaker 3: foreign language gene. But my brother Rowley, who does who
Speaker 3: does radio for ABC, he's a Slavonic linguist and he
Speaker 3: can he can pick up a language very, very easily.
Speaker 3: He's got about five or six.
Speaker 1: So what age do you come back to Australia.
Speaker 3: As a teenager and dad got a job in far North.
Speaker 1: Queensland, Far North Queensland.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Townsville.
Speaker 1: You're a teenager in Townsville. What was it like?
Speaker 3: Well, it was I didn't like the climate. It was
Speaker 3: you know, when you've got enough problems being a teenager
Speaker 3: without moving house abruptly to an entirely different climate and
Speaker 3: a different place. And yeah. So and that's how I
Speaker 3: got into reading science fiction because I was in the
Speaker 3: library and you could read about really dark stuff like J. G.
Speaker 3: Beallard when there was a just there was a I
Speaker 3: was reading science fiction in the library because you could
Speaker 3: get out of your head and into another place. And
Speaker 3: that was what science fiction did, which was my early
Speaker 3: interest in it.
Speaker 1: Science fiction and horror. Though there's an impact on your mental.
Speaker 3: Health, I'd say it's quite bad. And being a teenager,
Speaker 3: I understand. I mean, I'm not a I'm not a
Speaker 3: splatter fan, but I like ghost stories. I mean there's
Speaker 3: really good Australian ghost stories and some New Zealand ones too.
Speaker 1: Lucy Sussex is my guest, folks. She is the co
Speaker 1: writer of a book called Outrageous Fortune about Mary Fortune.
Speaker 1: It's a true story about this lady who wrote crime
Speaker 1: and crime fiction in the nineteenth century Melbourne, but an
Speaker 1: interesting life she had before all of that. Back after
Speaker 1: the break, Welcome back to conversations, everybody. If you just
Speaker 1: tuned in, I'm speaking to Lucy Sussex, an author with
Speaker 1: a great name. That's not a student m isn't it.
Speaker 1: That's your real name?
Speaker 3: You didn't, Yep, that's my real name.
Speaker 1: It's a great name and a prolific author of very
Speaker 1: varying genres. But her book that we're talking about today
Speaker 1: is Outrageous Fortunes. It's the adventures of Mary Fortune, who
Speaker 1: was a crime writer in the tenth century. Melbourne. Tell
Speaker 1: us about this Mary Fortune. I mean she was she's
Speaker 1: born in Ireland.
Speaker 3: Yeah, she was born in Belfast in the eighteen thirties
Speaker 3: and her father father, her mother died after she was born,
Speaker 3: and her father went. He was traveling around Ireland I
Speaker 3: think were as working as a civil engineer, and during
Speaker 3: the famine they went, they moved, they went across the
Speaker 3: Atlantic to Quebec and he was working on the railways.
Speaker 3: And so she married a young so his name was Wilson's.
Speaker 3: You try doing any research and to anybody called Wilson,
Speaker 3: he was George Mary. It's really difficult to trace. But
Speaker 3: she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune, which was a
Speaker 3: much more distinctive name, and that's how she became Mary Fortune.
Speaker 3: And they had one son, and then her father, George.
Speaker 3: The eighteen fifty one gold Russian Melbourne and Victoria happened
Speaker 3: and that was huge although and people from all over
Speaker 3: the world immigrated. So he came down, came to Victoria,
Speaker 3: and after a couple of years she followed with her son.
Speaker 3: And the evidence is that there was trouble in her
Speaker 3: marriage and she took her child and ran and.
Speaker 1: So this is Mary's mother.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is this is Mary Fortune and her son
Speaker 3: by Joseph Fortune.
Speaker 1: Okay, well I missed, I missed the part where she
Speaker 1: got married.
Speaker 3: Oh so so she married a surveyor called Joseph Fortune.
Speaker 1: And then that was with that in candidate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was. That was that was in Quebec. And
Speaker 3: the trouble with Quebec was that divorce was difficult in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century because so most people. So there's a
Speaker 3: lot of bigger me going on, which I'll get on too,
Speaker 3: but people just vanished and then turned up again. And
Speaker 3: so you know, hopped on a ship crossed so from
Speaker 3: you know, West Australia to South Australia and just conveniently
Speaker 3: forgot that they had a family and got married again.
Speaker 3: You know, this thing happened a lot. So she joined
Speaker 3: her father on the gold fields, and she later writes
Speaker 3: a memoir of the gold fields. He wasn't a digger,
Speaker 3: he was a he was a storekeeper by then, but
Speaker 3: he was a man in his fifties. It was probably
Speaker 3: too hard work for really hard physical work. And then
Speaker 3: the story gets really weird.
Speaker 1: She writes accounts of life on the gold fields yeah,
Speaker 1: and I suppose now it's a distant it's our distant history.
Speaker 1: We probably studied it at one stage. How did she
Speaker 1: see it? How did she portray it?
Speaker 3: She actually portrayed it. She was as a period of
Speaker 3: freedom because women in middle class, nice ladies in the
Speaker 3: nineteenth century and all of a sudden you're into this
Speaker 3: crater escape of people furiously digging. And she said it
Speaker 3: was so free because you didn't have to observe appearances
Speaker 3: so much, and some of the social strictures weren't applicable,
Speaker 3: and so she really liked living in the Australian colonies.
Speaker 3: And she was also pro, very much pro the Eureka stockage.
Speaker 3: She caught it, and of course it was pretty much right.
Speaker 3: She arrived in Melbourne the year after it happened, and
Speaker 3: she was writing. She was writing poetry and some of
Speaker 3: it was quite revolutionary, and she sent it to the
Speaker 3: local paper on the gold Fields and they printed it
Speaker 3: and then they said, oh, under her initials m HF.
Speaker 3: And they said, oh, well, you know MHF will call
Speaker 3: it at the office and at his earliest convenience, and
Speaker 3: so you know, she turns up in a quinnoline with
Speaker 3: a small child, and they say, oh, well, we were
Speaker 3: in need of a sub editor. We thought that MHF
Speaker 3: he might have suited. But of course not many female
Speaker 3: journalists at that stage, so she didn't get the job.
Speaker 3: Had she got it, she would have been a bit
Speaker 3: like Catherine Helen Spence, pioneering in that area area. But
Speaker 3: instead she turned into a crime writer.
Speaker 1: But in the meantime she remarries without having a divorce.
Speaker 1: She had a child before she remarried or subsequent.
Speaker 3: Yes, the year after she arrives in Australia, she has
Speaker 3: a child and we don't know who the father is,
Speaker 3: but anything could have happened on the goldfields and her
Speaker 3: eldest child died and so she called this child by
Speaker 3: the same name, George, and he grew up to be
Speaker 3: a career criminal. But when he was only two she
Speaker 3: married a policeman. She married a mounted trooper on the
Speaker 3: Australian Goldfield's called Percy Brett. They both lied about lied
Speaker 3: on the marriage certificate here about his age, and they
Speaker 3: both and she that she'd been married before and had children,
Speaker 3: which is something that you were supposed to fill out.
Speaker 3: My grandfather was an Anglican clergyman and in the early
Speaker 3: years of his He says that if he was conducting
Speaker 3: a marriage with people who are widowed, he would ask
Speaker 3: them to write in the you know, just when they
Speaker 3: were widowed and where, just to cover himself in case
Speaker 3: they might be in crust, they might be legal problem,
Speaker 3: because this sort of thing was absolutely rife and the colonies.
Speaker 3: You know, Daisy Baits, she made two big of his marriages.
Speaker 3: You know, she married Break morand and then she marries
Speaker 3: two other guys in quick succession. You know, it was
Speaker 3: just it just happened because people couldn't get divorced. But
Speaker 3: her marriage to Percy Brett doesn't last long. He probably
Speaker 3: found out her son was illegitimate or that she had
Speaker 3: a husband in Canada. But from him she got to
Speaker 3: know a lot about the police on the gold Fields,
Speaker 3: and she becomes fascinated by how they operated in the days.
Speaker 3: So she knows what it's like to be in the
Speaker 3: era before forensics and how they would catch what their
Speaker 3: lives were like, and the sort of things they did
Speaker 3: and how they caught criminals. And she's one of the
Speaker 3: few women in the nineteenth century with that knowledge. And
Speaker 3: eventually she came about ten years later, she comes to
Speaker 3: use it.
Speaker 1: But what sort of person was she? I mean, you're
Speaker 1: talking about the various times of the scrape she had
Speaker 1: with the police, like drunkenness and disorderly and the like.
Speaker 1: But at the same time she seems quite well educated
Speaker 1: and moves quite comfortably within a middle class of society.
Speaker 3: Well, her father wrote poetry, and we know that. And
Speaker 3: and yes, she knows French, she may know a little
Speaker 3: bit of she may know Latin. She can write in
Speaker 3: the voice of a male of the era quite convincingly.
Speaker 1: So did she Why did she feel she had to
Speaker 1: write in the voice of a male like some of
Speaker 1: the other great female authors.
Speaker 3: It was just sort of anonymity. Women was supposed to
Speaker 3: belong to the house and be domestic. That the angel
Speaker 3: in the house was the ideal, despite the fact that
Speaker 3: you know the most that the most powerful person in
Speaker 3: the British Empire was a woman, Queen Victoria. I mean,
Speaker 3: that was the ideal, But in fact, a lot of
Speaker 3: women would make extra money writing for writing fiction, like
Speaker 3: the Bronzes and like George George Eliott, who was really
Speaker 3: Mary Ann Evans. But Mary Fortune was writing police fiction
Speaker 3: and she was doing this in the first person, so
Speaker 3: She was probably the first woman to write in the
Speaker 3: voice of the police and her detective Mark Sinclair, and
Speaker 3: has the same voice in some of her just the
Speaker 3: rights woman centric journalism as well color pieces as they
Speaker 3: call it, and the voices are very similar. But it's
Speaker 3: someone who's very irreverent, who's got a black sense of humor,
Speaker 3: who's got guts, who's a little bit of a loner.
Speaker 1: So this is this is the main character of her stories.
Speaker 3: But also you can see the same persona in her
Speaker 3: when she's writing autogiographical pieces as well. And she doesn't
Speaker 3: mention that she's well, it's proven that she was had
Speaker 3: up sent to jail for being drunk in Melbourne. And
Speaker 3: you know, you know, if you'd had an illegitimate child,
Speaker 3: you have led a rough life on the gold fields,
Speaker 3: you know, you might you know, you might be given
Speaker 3: to drowning your sorrows now and then. And colonial alcohol
Speaker 3: is incredibly strong, so you know, she.
Speaker 1: She seems a bit of a loose lady to me.
Speaker 1: I mean it just without knowing it. I'm just from
Speaker 1: your descriptions, she seems rather loose with her morals.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you call that. I mean, she's
Speaker 3: of course, Well, how did you call it? I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean sort of bohemian is how is how she's
Speaker 3: a couple of people described it, and.
Speaker 1: That means, well, there's a certain useless of morality.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, but I mean she might not have had
Speaker 3: an illegitimate child by choice. Because also she writes about rape,
Speaker 3: including gang rape on the gold Fields. And she's the
Speaker 3: only nineteenth century writer I know who does write about
Speaker 3: gang who women writer who does write about it? And
Speaker 3: and this is an era when women are supposed to
Speaker 3: be mider class women supposed to be so delicate and
Speaker 3: high mind to not know about such things. But she
Speaker 3: can because she's got the persona of a cop, and
Speaker 3: so she can write about these things. But explicitly, I
Speaker 3: think say that she's a free spirit and a bit wild.
Speaker 3: And yeah, she should have been born in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: She could have been a hippie.
Speaker 1: It sounds like she was fun.
Speaker 3: I think she was. She comes across, as you know,
Speaker 3: and she addresses you directly, and you think, now you
Speaker 3: could here's someone who had been really interesting. And if
Speaker 3: they took you on a guide a tour of Melbourne,
Speaker 3: nineteenth century of Melbourne, it would have been one hell
Speaker 3: of a tour.
Speaker 1: Lucy's Sussex is my guest co author of a book
Speaker 1: about Mary Fortune called Outrageous Fortunes. Back shortly, Welcome back
Speaker 1: to conversations, everybody, Now, if you've just tuned in, we're
Speaker 1: talking to an academic lady, an author. Right, many various
Speaker 1: genres and I've just read them. Fantasy, science fiction, children's
Speaker 1: and teenage writing, nonfiction, true crime. Which of those do
Speaker 1: you prefer, Lucy Sussex.
Speaker 3: I get. I enjoy writing all of them because I
Speaker 3: enjoy writing and I like but I like researching, and
Speaker 3: that's partly why I got into Mary Fortune, because of
Speaker 3: being a researcher. And my co writer Megan Brown, she's
Speaker 3: also a searcher, so we had much time in archives.
Speaker 1: It sounded as she was Mary Fortune was difficult to research.
Speaker 1: There am I writing saying.
Speaker 3: That, yes, started off with just the name and that
Speaker 3: the suggestion that she was a woman. But luckily she'd
Speaker 3: written this autobiographical fiction for the Australian Journal, which was
Speaker 3: all over Australia. It had a very wide distribution and
Speaker 3: that was It lasted in the eighteen sixty five until
Speaker 3: the nineteen until nearly the Night until the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 3: She wrote for that and so initially she was so
Speaker 3: she began writing poetry, but then she but she also
Speaker 3: had these autographographical pieces and from that you could find
Speaker 3: out quite a lot about her. She wrote under the
Speaker 3: pseudonym but for about the Goldfields quite vividly, and you
Speaker 3: could have pis things together. And the real clue to
Speaker 3: her name was that she arrives arriving in Melbourne in
Speaker 3: eighteen fifty five with a small boy who's never named,
Speaker 3: but in a piece of journalism about what she did
Speaker 3: on Christmas Day in eighteen sixty eight, she's wandering around
Speaker 3: Melbourne with another boy and she says he's never seen
Speaker 3: the sun before, such as the sea before. And I thought, okay, well,
Speaker 3: well maybe if he can't be her, can't be her son,
Speaker 3: that first child, So it must have been the other.
Speaker 3: Maybe you know, she had another child, Maybe she remarried.
Speaker 3: Maybe that first child died, because why would a boy
Speaker 3: not be with his mother on Christmas Day? So I
Speaker 3: went looking through the microfilmed births, deaths and marriages, and
Speaker 3: I found a little boy called George's Fortune, who died
Speaker 3: in Central Victoria in eighteen fifty eight and his mother
Speaker 3: was given as Mary hed On, a fortune born in Belfast,
Speaker 3: and from that I had her father's name, her mother's
Speaker 3: name when she got married, and that was that was
Speaker 3: and that was the first time we had her full name.
Speaker 3: And then you could go on from there. You know,
Speaker 3: you had to do a bibliography, which was.
Speaker 1: How long does it hell does it take to pour
Speaker 1: through all of that stuff, those records? How long does
Speaker 1: it take you to find something like the actual name?
Speaker 1: And is that a Eureka moment for you? Well?
Speaker 3: Is that was one afternoon which we had the Eureka moment,
Speaker 3: but found out she wrote over five hundred stories and
Speaker 3: so you had to do a list of that. Then
Speaker 3: you had to read them, and Megan and I had
Speaker 3: to read them at least twice. And then quite late
Speaker 3: in the re search we found via trove, you know,
Speaker 3: wonderful trove, long may it be funded. We found out
Speaker 3: there was another pseudonym and another ninety items. So we
Speaker 3: just had to stop writing and start reading again, and
Speaker 3: you know, that was another Eureka moment. But there was
Speaker 3: a lot of hard slogging and going down and going
Speaker 3: down rabbit holes and not finding anything there and it
Speaker 3: took about it took it took decades really to get it.
Speaker 3: And the thing that made the difference was that the
Speaker 3: digitization of newspapers and records and censuses so that you
Speaker 3: could actually look up information. And we're working during the
Speaker 3: pandemic and it couldn't leave the house, but you know,
Speaker 3: you could still get hold of the sense. The Ulster
Speaker 3: Historical Society of Records have just gone online and wow,
Speaker 3: so I could visit, So I could visit Belfast and
Speaker 3: in virtuality, if not actuality, and find out stuff.
Speaker 1: This might seem like a rude question, Lucy, what do
Speaker 1: you do for fun? Me? Oh, don't tell me that's fun.
Speaker 3: Actually it is, It really is, because it's it's like
Speaker 3: the thrill of a chase, of a cult chase. No,
Speaker 3: I'm interested in birds, and I'm interested in bushwalking and
Speaker 3: music and all sorts, all sorts of things. Lately, I've
Speaker 3: been to South Australia. I've been to the for the
Speaker 3: writer this week, but also for the for the Adelaide
Speaker 3: Festival for the music. So and I lived with the
Speaker 3: wine buff So lots of interest.
Speaker 1: So we come back to Mary Fortune and she writes
Speaker 1: the first the Detectives album. Now this this is a
Speaker 1: significant publication, isn't it. Can you can you explain what
Speaker 1: the Detective's album?
Speaker 3: Okay, it's a serial in the published in the Australian Journal.
Speaker 3: So and that's the the Australian Journal.
Speaker 1: Just interrupting. Sorry, that was like a national yeah, probably
Speaker 1: like a.
Speaker 3: Newspaper magazine and so it's like a fiction magazine like
Speaker 3: they used to have until radio came along and TV
Speaker 3: and that was distributed in all the colonies, including New Zealand,
Speaker 3: which was then the seventh Australian colony, and it went everywhere,
Speaker 3: so she had a huge readership. But the Detective's Album,
Speaker 3: the conceit behind that was that it's a detective police
Speaker 3: detective who keeps an album of photographs of people whom
Speaker 3: he's convicted and arrested and convicted and he's writing up
Speaker 3: his memoirs and this is what he uses so each
Speaker 3: so this is this album, and this is slightly before
Speaker 3: the police actually start using compiling their own visual records
Speaker 3: of criminals. So she's in advance here. She saw what
Speaker 3: was happening. And this starts in the eighteen sixties and
Speaker 3: it lasts almost until her death.
Speaker 1: It's a weekly publication.
Speaker 3: It started off weekly and then it became monthly. So
Speaker 3: there's over five hundred detective album stories. Apart from a
Speaker 3: blip for a few years, this lasts for forty years.
Speaker 3: It's the longest known detective crime series worldwide. There's nothing
Speaker 3: like it. And this goes on for It's so popular
Speaker 3: that everybody that you know that the magazine has to
Speaker 3: keep her on staff, even if she's a bit wild
Speaker 3: at times.
Speaker 1: So it's a serial.
Speaker 3: It's short story. You think about Sherlock Holmes and the
Speaker 3: series of short stories novellas which came out or so
Speaker 3: it's not novels. So it's short, short fiction. But she
Speaker 3: can stretch it to about sometimes twenty thousand words and
Speaker 3: she'd do that every month. That she'd keep it up
Speaker 3: for years.
Speaker 1: Twenty thousand words. She had a month to write that.
Speaker 3: I suppose you can do that, and sometimes I think
Speaker 3: she was very close to deadline. She had to had
Speaker 3: to dash off to the printers in the middle of
Speaker 3: the night.
Speaker 1: Paid for something like that.
Speaker 3: Well, the thing is that there's one of her editors
Speaker 3: that there's an attitude at the Australian Journal, a man
Speaker 3: called Ron Campbell, who was a crime and rich fiction
Speaker 3: writer himself. He said that she probably wrote more and
Speaker 3: got paid less than any other contemporary writer. And this
Speaker 3: is because she was a woman, and that at the
Speaker 3: time women journalists were paid less than males, and there
Speaker 3: wasn't equity in the level of pay. And so people
Speaker 3: like Marcus Clark, who was whom she knew and was
Speaker 3: a literary rival of hers, he was paid reasonably well,
Speaker 3: but still he died under difficult circumstances. But she was
Speaker 3: a great survivor. And because she could write crime, but
Speaker 3: she also wrote women's journalism and novels, she could turn
Speaker 3: her hand to various things. So she managed to keep
Speaker 3: on writing for forty years, even though the occasional day
Speaker 3: job was recorded that she was a governess. She was
Speaker 3: a housekeeper on stations armas in Victoria. She was you know,
Speaker 3: she had she was able to have side jobs, but
Speaker 3: she had it because she had her vocation was writing,
Speaker 3: but she had, but she needed a day job a
Speaker 3: lot of the time.
Speaker 1: All this has done in long hand, isn't it freestyle?
Speaker 3: Yep, there's only one example of her. There's only one
Speaker 3: letter of hers known to survive, and that's when she's
Speaker 3: very old. And her handwriting stateria writing because her eyesight's going.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it was all written in long hand, and
Speaker 3: then you'd take it to the print works and then
Speaker 3: the compositor would set it into type and they'd do
Speaker 3: a dummy run. They'd print it on paper and then
Speaker 3: they'd check it for miss Princes and then then then
Speaker 3: the magazine would be printed printed by hand the way
Speaker 3: it used to be. So yes, there's, there's Yeah. It
Speaker 3: was entirely different in those days.
Speaker 1: So she wrote with a shudon and mainly as a
Speaker 1: portraying herself as a male, as a man. Did now
Speaker 1: was she ever outer? Did she out herself? Was she
Speaker 1: Was it a matter of somebody discovering her or was
Speaker 1: it just the natural progression?
Speaker 3: Well, at one stage she was very nearly outed because
Speaker 3: her son George had got into bad company when he
Speaker 3: was young and it progressed and he robbed her back
Speaker 3: and in eighteen eighty five in Melbourne, and this was
Speaker 3: one of the biggest heists of that era, and it
Speaker 3: lasted for decades, but in the sense that people would
Speaker 3: be who involved in it would be hanged for other crimes,
Speaker 3: so it was very much before the public and somebody
Speaker 3: actually named was missus Fortune because they had the same surname,
Speaker 3: George Mary Fortune and George Fortune. And after that she
Speaker 3: added an extra F to her name, a Welsh spelling
Speaker 3: fortune with two f's, which caused lots of problems later
Speaker 3: when people are trying to find her death date and
Speaker 3: they were looking under fortune with one F and they
Speaker 3: could only find it and and I found it eventually,
Speaker 3: partly by accident, and found it under two f's. But yeah,
Speaker 3: she was close to being outed, but never was quite
Speaker 3: never was completely exposed. She was a woman of mystery.
Speaker 1: Lucy Sussex is my guest as one of the authors
Speaker 1: of Outrageous Fortunes about this amazing lady was amazing. Interesting
Speaker 1: is probably a better word. I think Mary Fortune, crime writer.
Speaker 1: You mentioned her son. We'll talk about him when we
Speaker 1: come back, because he sort of lived out her real
Speaker 1: life crime. Back shortly, folks, we're speaking today with Lucy Sussex.
Speaker 1: Lucy's an author of many and varied genres, and she
Speaker 1: just loves books and reading and researching and delving into
Speaker 1: libraries and things. Actually, you have anme of librarianship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I always thought that would be interesting. Being a librarian.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and actually became a reference librarian, which means you're
Speaker 3: answering questions and you'd have to be on your feet
Speaker 3: because somebody would ask you about can I grow peanuts
Speaker 3: in Melbourne? And then the next question might be about.
Speaker 1: And you grow peanuts in Melbourne?
Speaker 3: Who you can? Probably best in the greenhouse, I think,
Speaker 3: But with climate change, you know, you just have to
Speaker 3: you'd have to be on your feet and I and
Speaker 3: that really was fun. It's a bit exhausting, but yeah,
Speaker 3: so but the skills I learned from that. Then I
Speaker 3: turned to her work and that was really thinking. You
Speaker 3: had to think where might I go to find this information?
Speaker 1: But look back to Mary. We've mentioned her son, we've
Speaker 1: introduced her him to the narrative. Now he plays out
Speaker 1: true crime. He's a scoundrel, isn't He's a.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Megan, Megan said to me, well, you know, she
Speaker 3: really wanted to like.
Speaker 1: And me.
Speaker 3: And thing is Megan her day job is working at
Speaker 3: teaching in the criminal juvenile criminal justice system of New
Speaker 3: South Wales, so she knows a bit about the subject
Speaker 3: and she knows how kids can just go off the
Speaker 3: rail and a lot of what George's experience I think
Speaker 3: is very relevant now and that you get a kid
Speaker 3: who's a bit disadvantaged and gets into bad company and
Speaker 3: is maybe a bit lonely, then gets into the whole
Speaker 3: mythos of being a crim and can't get out of
Speaker 3: it because this is their friends. What do they do?
Speaker 3: And he when he's fourteen, he gets arrested for stealing
Speaker 3: a hat and normally and so he went into the
Speaker 3: juvenile justice system and from that he never quite There
Speaker 3: was a four year period in which he wasn't but
Speaker 3: then he kept on getting in trouble and being incarcerated.
Speaker 3: He's a thief. He picks he picks locks. You know,
Speaker 3: they could have trained and become a locksmith and he
Speaker 3: probably would have done quite well at that. So he's
Speaker 3: involved in a bank bank robbery. There's another robbery in
Speaker 3: which there's which there's banello in Victoria in which they
Speaker 3: steal are safe from a hotel and they put it
Speaker 3: into a wheelbarrow to take it to someone where they
Speaker 3: can attack it open it without anybody seeing. So there's
Speaker 3: this bunch of blokes with reeling a wheelbarrow down the
Speaker 3: main street at one in the morning and somebody looks
Speaker 3: out the window and thinks, Oh, it's just some blokes
Speaker 3: taking their mate home he's had too much to drink.
Speaker 3: I had to research how you went about cracking a
Speaker 3: safe in the nineteenth century. And the thing is that
Speaker 3: she put this, she put this into a story of hers,
Speaker 3: in which there is a safe, a status and the
Speaker 3: wheelbarrow details. She puts it into a story of hers.
Speaker 1: So she recounts her son's escapades.
Speaker 3: She's like, she's like, she's she's using her memories of
Speaker 3: her husband, and then she's using this sort of stuff
Speaker 3: her son is getting up to, and you know, just
Speaker 3: for copy, and you think this is really weird. Here's
Speaker 3: a crime writer and then there's true crime in the family,
Speaker 3: and it's like they're pulling in opposite directions. But in
Speaker 3: her latest story, she's very much concerned with the notion
Speaker 3: of reform, in that what can you do with someone
Speaker 3: who's a marked criminal and the police know him, and
Speaker 3: that he's a usual suspect and can be arrested, and
Speaker 3: with some of his things for which he was arrested,
Speaker 3: we've got no idea whether he actually did it or
Speaker 3: whether he was just just conveniently picked up by the police.
Speaker 1: The son did he reform and live happily ever after.
Speaker 3: There was a four year period when he was he'd
Speaker 3: been assigned to a farmer, and he was quite good.
Speaker 3: He was good for about four years and then somebody
Speaker 3: asks them to help hide the stash of us of
Speaker 3: a robbery there, and he does that and he gets
Speaker 3: an anstime. He sent to adult prison. And it's not
Speaker 3: I've seen his handwriting. He wrote a good hand He's intelligent.
Speaker 3: When he was had up with the bank robbery, he
Speaker 3: wrote a letter to the judge and handed it to
Speaker 3: the judge playing asking for leniency because his mother was
Speaker 3: an old woman. And it's a very well written letter,
Speaker 3: and the judge gave it to the press, and it
Speaker 3: was reprinted in colonies, in all the number of colonial newspapers.
Speaker 3: So he was not she'd been. She'd brought him up
Speaker 3: to read and write and Noah's Bible, and she'd done
Speaker 3: the best best that she could to equip him as
Speaker 3: a single mother. But it was but you know, things
Speaker 3: were really tough. That's that's when you're bring up a
Speaker 3: boy alone. And the boy is a bit mischievous, as
Speaker 3: she notes, and what can you do if they get
Speaker 3: off the rails in these days it's cognitive behavioral therapy
Speaker 3: sometimes works and that's probably the most successful thing, but
Speaker 3: it costs money, and the prison system is stressed, and
Speaker 3: he does try to make good. He goes to Tasmania.
Speaker 3: He thinks he'll get away from it all. But of
Speaker 3: course the police and Tasmania are why to say, look,
Speaker 3: here's this criminal. He's coming to tasmais keep your eyes out.
Speaker 3: And on the same ship as on the boat to Tasmania,
Speaker 3: there's another criminal who he knew from Pentridge Prison and
Speaker 3: within a very short time there's a robbery and then
Speaker 3: to Hobart jail. So he's just as much known to
Speaker 3: the Tasmanian police as he is to the Hobart police.
Speaker 3: And he's just he's a bit of a wag. He
Speaker 3: picks his lock in Hobart prison and of course they
Speaker 3: give him an extra sentence for that, and they give
Speaker 3: him put him in solitary in the middle of winter,
Speaker 3: you know, bread and water and no blankets. But that
Speaker 3: probably contributes to his death. And he dies without ever
Speaker 3: being released again in his in his fifties.
Speaker 1: How did Mary's demise? Did she live out a happy life?
Speaker 3: The end of her life was happy. I think she
Speaker 3: felt herself to be. She was a bit of a batler.
Speaker 3: At the end of her life, the pension came in.
Speaker 3: She had the opportunity to vote, and so she's on
Speaker 3: the electoral roles, I mean South Australia first, then New Zealand,
Speaker 3: then Victoria. So she's on the electoral roles and she's
Speaker 3: eligible for the pension. But the trouble is that it's
Speaker 3: when the first pension is the things and it's depended
Speaker 3: on good conduct and can you prove sobriety a period
Speaker 3: of years, and of course she can't. This is pretty
Speaker 3: rough on people who are given that the how much
Speaker 3: of the Australian population like a tipple, And so she
Speaker 3: can't get the pension and she ends up in What's
Speaker 3: and she's losing her eyesight so she can't write, and
Speaker 3: she ends up in a and a charitable institution. But
Speaker 3: with the Federal pensions, they when they bring that in
Speaker 3: in nineteen ten, that's for everyone, regardless of whether they've
Speaker 3: whether they're sober or not. And so she has the
Speaker 3: money at the end of her life, and her employers
Speaker 3: at the Australian Journal, they ensure that there's a nurse
Speaker 3: to look after her because she's in Feebod and she
Speaker 3: dies in nineteen eleven and she's buried at the expense
Speaker 3: of the proprietors of the Australian Journal in Springvale Cemetery
Speaker 3: in an unmarked grave.
Speaker 1: There's a photo you standing by that that grave was
Speaker 1: at a somber moment for you.
Speaker 3: It felt very strange. It does because I've been searching
Speaker 3: for a death record for so long. But I literally
Speaker 3: did that. I visited in the morning and then I
Speaker 3: basically drove up to a conference in Ballarat, the Australian
Speaker 3: Touring Studies give a paper announce the death rate, and
Speaker 3: then there's a there's a young lady from South Australia,
Speaker 3: a students sitting in the audience and she opens up
Speaker 3: her laptop and in question time she gets onto Austin
Speaker 3: the Australian Literature database for which she's doing some work for,
Speaker 3: and she updates it with Mary Fortune's record with the
Speaker 3: death date death date within minutes. And you have to
Speaker 3: say that that's the wonders of technology.
Speaker 1: And that so she heard you, Yeah, she was present,
Speaker 1: she heard you. Then she put it on the database.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there it is in the public eye. Within minutes.
Speaker 1: We've come to the end, Lucy, and people need to
Speaker 1: buy the book if they're fascinated by this fascinating lady.
Speaker 1: And it's a it's Australian history too. I think it's
Speaker 1: significant she filled an important role. Good job with it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 3: Us, and thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1: Lucy Sussex was my guest, folks, co author of Outrageous Fortunes.
Speaker 1: It's the story the adventures of Mary Fortune, crime writer
Speaker 1: and a little bit about her son who ended up
Speaker 1: a career criminal as well. Thank you so much for
Speaker 1: joining us.