Dual biographies are a flavourful dish spiced by the interactions between their subjects — be they political rivals (like Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins in T. Lyle Dwyer’s Big Fellow, Long Fellow, or Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in Harrison Salisbury’s The New Emperors) or studies of sibling rivalry run amok (Samantha Morris’s Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia).
So when a new example of the genre (a dual biography by dual biographers, no less) sums up the story in six introductory words as “Mary wrote crime; George committed it” we have before us a highly combustible combination.
Though victims of circumstance, both subjects of Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex’s Outrageous Fortunes found agency — and renown — in the bustling Australian colonies, even if the sweet taste that brought to the mother’s life soon cloyed whereas her son’s time was almost unremittingly bitter.
Nearly vanished from literary history after her death in the antebellum years of the twentieth century, pioneering Australian crime author Mary Helena Fortune has been freshly resurrected — in a manner of writing.
Fortune pioneered shortform crime writing in these once-convict colonies. The Detective’s Album, whose first number appeared in 1871, became the longest-running serial in our early crime fiction, spanning more than forty years and 500 stories. If our literary pantheon were a police archive, Mary Fortune would rank high on the “Missing Persons” index. No longer: more than a century after disappearing, she has been found alive.
In Charlottetown, capital of Prince Edward Island, back in 2016, I came across a vast empty block some way out of town. Dotted with cracked tombstones from the era of Victorian settlement, it was a cemetery for victims of Ireland’s potato famine, whose remains can be found in such graveyards across eastern Canada, from Newfoundland to Ontario.
One such was Fortune father’s — who, as a single parent, brought Mary to Montreal in the late 1840s when she was a teen. By 1861, when he died in Canada, Mary was living in far-off Australia, having made her name as a pub owner on the Victorian goldfields and as a promising young writer.
By then her second husband, Percy Rollo Brett, ancestor of renowned political scientist Judith Brett, had left her. As for her first, Joseph, whose surname she bore for the rest of her life, no traces have been found: which is saying something given the sleuthing skills, and not least the stamina, of Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, Mary’s resurrectionists.
Fortune’s firstborn died (as so many did in those days) but her second-born, George, lived. Brett vamoosed to somewhere in New South Wales, turning the daughter of a single father into a single mother with a son.
Sometimes the authors’ reasonable inference overleaps into amateur psychologising, as with the remark: “Mary Fortune’s obsessive recycling of Brett [as a writer] suggests the parting was not by mutual consent.” But, with Brown and Sussex on the case, insightfulness is never far away: “A tough woman on the frontier could not let grief destroy her. Mary Fortune fragmented her experience into fiction. The shards recombine in patterns like a kaleidoscope, the original components just visible.”
Like a science-fiction writer anticipating future worlds, Fortune, an early camera hobbyist, described the mugshot before it was a word or even a thing. The authors again: “Pentridge Prison would photograph villains; so would the Victorian Detective Office. But Fortune’s fiction got there first.”
Wisely, they foreground Mary, with much of son George’s unfortunate life then coming into focus through that lens. As her short stories gained acceptance — Melbourne’s afternoon Herald publishing her regularly and, in the 1870s, even hiring her as a journalist (a female journalist, what was the world coming to?) — Mary instinctively did what today’s Creative 101 writing classes instruct: wrote out of her own experience.
Who could blame her mid-1850s incarnation (goldfields grog-shanty proprietress) for turning to the bottle? Fortune’s first sight of a Melbourne jail from the inside came in the 1860s when she was convicted of being “drunk and disorderly.” A decade later, with literary aliases Waif Wander and Sylphid (on the Herald’s Ladies’ Pages) providing an inadequate blanket of protection, a return to prison exposed her to shameful dismissal, in both senses. (The Herald sacked her.)
As the editor of a magazine that had published her consistently said, “God knows, she probably had every reason [to drink], as she wrote more, and doubtless got less for it, than any other Australian writer of the time.”
Mary could no more live by her pen than can many a writer today, and living without it was even harder. By 1875 she resided in a home run by a “charity for distressed governesses.” George couldn’t be with her because house rules forbade male cohabitants. By this point she’d produced four serialised novels, poems, journalism and more than sixty short stories.
Now fatherless and motherless, George (“my kindly little one,” as Mary versified when he was eight, but a larrikin at twice that age) was made a ward of the state. Two months after his committal, Mary made twenty-eight applications to get him out.
A couple of years later, after he made his debut court appearance, George’s reality was reflected in a short story, “The Convict Son,” in which the subject’s mother says his face has “a wild hunted look.” Within months, police were looking for her too, as she had been “a reluctant witness” to a rape in Easey Street, Collingwood. The authors point out that fifty years later the street was home to gangland figure Squizzy Taylor — but inexplicably fail to mention that its notoriety recurred another fifty years later, in 1977, when it was the scene of a double murder for which the alleged culprit is only now awaiting trial.
The second part of Outrageous Fortunes traces a sad succession of associations George forms in which his need for male respect, whether from the father figure near Kilmore who gives him farm work or from so-called mates of an unscrupulous dye, leads to his repeated involvement in property crime. Starting as lookout during feats of housebreaking and culminating in a bank robbery on Ned Kelly’s old stomping ground, George is never violent but soon becomes the very model of a Victorian petty-criminal.
Next time you’re at the cafe outside Pellegrini’s looking towards Melbourne’s Paperback Bookshop, let your mind wander down the lane that runs between them. That precinct (yes, just a block away from Parliament House) was the heart of Melbourne’s red-light district, with Crossley Lane, known intriguingly as Romeo’s Lane back in Fortune’s time, “allegedly for the male sex workers.”
Laced with Victorian-era references, this psychological portrait doubles as social document. We learn about “fizgigs” — paid police informants — and also, as “Fortune explores the grey area between thief-catcher and thief” and depicts temptresses working under cover, our own inquisitive duo rightly mention twenty-first-century lawyer–police informant Nicola Gobbo, leaving attentive readers to draw the obvious conclusion. Plus ça change.
The odd annoying error obtrudes, but what book doesn’t have them? Fortune’s 1893 short story “The Star-Spangled Banner” is misattributed to 1895 in the text. It’s contestable whether the Indian Mutiny of 1857 really amounted to “the First War of Indian Independence”; and naming Cole’s Book Arcade among “the many businesses seriously affected or closed” by the 1890s Depression is apt to mislead. While slightly past its heyday, E.G.’s emporium traded right through into the new century, not closing its doors until the year of the next great economic crash, 1929.
I should add, for the benefit of editors who might otherwise let a little geographic chauvinism tempt them to repeat the error, that Brown and Sussex’s claim that “Melbourne became the largest and wealthiest city in the southern hemisphere” in the 1880s is only half right. Marvellous Melbourne’s population rose from 280,000 to 490,000 that decade; but Rio de Janeiro’s stood at just over half a million in 1890, and at the beginning of the eighties fast-expanding Buenos Aires was already 300,000-plus.
The final chapters of Outrageous Fortunes are inevitably sad. In the best Victorian tradition, I shall draw a veil over most of the details the authors admirably recount, beyond noting that, sonless and sunless, Mary ended her days in North Melbourne’s euphemistically named Benevolent Asylum.
Resurrections are rare, but this isn’t Mary Fortune’s first. In 1950 an Australian-literature buff indulged in his own research-and-rescue mission, proclaiming her the world’s first female crime writer. Thanks to Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, she is no longer among the most obscure. •
Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-writer, and Her Criminal Son George
By Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex | La Trobe University Press | $36.99 | 352 pages
