Waif Wander

In 1871, the most frequently published woman in Australia was Mary Helena Fortune. She was also an inmate at The Melbourne Home, a halfway house for ‘respectable females’ who were listed on a public register of workers for hire. The Home was strict: there was an 11pm curfew; only female friends could visit; inmates were not allowed to read in bed. ‘What was Mary Fortune doing in a charity for distressed governesses?’ ask Megan Brown and Lucy Sussex, the authors of Outrageous Fortunes, a biography that endeavours to answer this very question – a question with the added significance that Mary Helena Fortune would come to be known as the world’s first woman detective writer.

An enigmatic character in Australian letters, Fortune seems to have buried the evidence from much of her early life. It is clear that Brown and Sussex’s research involved its own kind of detective work, by ‘seeking the clues hidden in [Fortune’s] vast bibliography […] her game was to drop self-referential fragments – names and events from her life – into her writing.’ Born in County Antrim, Mary was only fourteen when she left Belfast during An Gorta Mór (Irish for the Great Hunger, widely known as the Great Famine). Before arriving in Australia, she had lived in Quebec with her engineer father, as her mother had died only months after giving birth. Later, Fortune would write that she ‘never knew either mother or sister or brother’. As a teenager in Quebec, Mary married and had a child with a twenty-five-year-old Canadian named Joseph Fortune, but the marriage didn’t last. Mary eventually reunited with her father, travelling with him and her young son to Victoria, where she was commissioned to write about the goldfields for the London magazine The Ladies’ Companion. It was here that Mary became pregnant again and gave birth to her second child, George, in 1856. Two years later, her elder son died; following this tragedy, she remarried, this time to a constable (who, later in life, would be taken hostage by Ned Kelly). Once again, the marriage was short-lived, but the inspiration it gave her stories proved more enduring.

Thus, by the time she published her first stories, Fortune had married twice, suffered the loss of a young child, and moved between three continents. As both an insider and outsider, Fortune offered a complex picture of nineteenth-century Victoria, a place cramped with class distinctions that gave rise to a rich mélange of vernaculars. Slang abounds in Fortune’s stories with accusations of ‘gammoning’ (pretending), shouts of ‘Bedad!’ (By God), and assurances of ‘Sorra fear’ (No chance). Social standing shifts with language, as one of her characters points out: ‘He chops and murders the Queen’s English to please the likes of you.’ Brown and Sussex note that the idioms and speech patterns of Irish immigrants are reproduced with particular care, betraying Fortune’s nostalgia for her home country.

In more ways than one, Fortune led a double life: inhabiting in her professional sphere the higher echelons of literary society, while in her private world, she rubbed shoulders with an underclass of thieves and beggars, and was often locked up for inebriation or homelessness. Fortune kept the details of the latter under lock and key, especially since bigamy was illegal (see the sensational ‘accidental bigamy’ novel of the 1850s, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret) and she had remarried without officially dissolving her first union – another murky ellipsis in her life story. But some details are easier to hide than others. After being offered an editing job by a newspaper, she was fired upon the revelation of her gender. Another publication ceased working with Fortune after she wrote a story wherein the narrator visits her son in prison. She often wrote under pseudonyms, such as ‘Waif Wander’ (W.W.) and ‘Sylphid’, which she adopted for her Ladies’ Page newspaper column. In assuming such disguises, she mirrored her son George, who, after an early life of semi-constant incarceration, first in an Industrial School and later in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison, would die as a prisoner in Hobart Gaol.

Fortune’s precarious circumstances at the intersection of these social and historical forces propel her short fiction, recently collected in Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging (edited by her biographers, Brown and Sussex) – the title a reference to a comment made by workmen in her ‘Queen of Diamonds’ story: ‘I’m sick an’ tired ov yer stories! It’s nothin’ but bloodshed and hangin’ an’ murther wid ye from wan week’s end to another, until I’m a’most afeared to go to sleep ov a night at all, at all!’ The breathlessness of the collection’s title highlights the stories’ propulsiveness – their density of incident and their directness (and violence) of detail and speech. ‘Oh, you are a pretty lot, you Melbourne police!’ cries an itinerant woman in ‘Down by the Yarra’, after she is harassed by an officer for sleeping under a bridge. Despite writing police procedurals, Fortune does not frame the cops in her stories in a particularly glowing light – the officer in this story suggests the woman drown herself in the river. Often having no fixed address (according to state records), Fortune herself experienced the kind of poverty that precludes trust in the authorities that she and George were at the mercy of.

But Fortune’s ventriloquising of the workmen would not be the only occasion on which she would reflect on her critical reception. Later, she would write:

This kind of lively irreverence and mercuriality defines not only her fiction, but her memoir Twenty-Six Years Ago; or, the Diggings from ’55, which was re-published by Penguin in 1989 as The Fortunes of Mary Fortune. If, as her biographers suggest, Mary extended her artistic license to her memoirs, this may well reflect a life lived between disparate realities, material and spiritual. Fortune was never quite faithful to any one belief system. ‘The woman who had frequented Melbourne’s Free Presbyterian Church now wrote about the Celtic cross and novenas like a true Catholic’, Brown and Sussex observe, despite noting that there is no evidence to suggest Fortune formally converted to Catholicism. Fortune’s stories are similarly pluralistic in their point of view: they decentre their protagonists by flitting between the perspectives of a whole multitude of characters to create a multifaceted looking glass.

One of the collection’s most compelling stories is ‘Bridget’s Locket’, a serial wherein a husband kills his wife, the eponymous Bridget, a young woman of comparatively greater means who journeys from Ireland to join him in Australia. Twice in the story Bridget says, ‘If only we had our baby alive’, in a nod perhaps to Fortune’s relationship with her first husband – their first child was lost to illness. Right from the outset, we can see that Bridget is unreliable as a narrator, stricken with grief over losing her child and longing for a husband she hasn’t seen for several years. Fortune uses the unsparing view of a fellow passenger at the port in Williamstown, an older woman named Jane, to voice scepticism about the relationship: ‘“You are so innocent, my poor child,” murmured Jane Webster, half to herself, “and it seems a pity to try and disturb your confidence in a man from whom you have been parted for three years. Does it never strike you that he may have met some one he liked better than you since you saw him last?”’ Jane’s voice seems to carry the wisdom of hindsight, almost as if an older Fortune were looking back upon her younger self. Indeed, Jane’s view is taken up by the narrator, who describes the man’s face as ‘not one so easily to be read as poor Bridget fondly believed’. It is left to Jane to find Bridget’s remains, and eventually track down her murderer husband, after recognising Bridget’s locket around the neck of his new wife. Even the Other Woman has a compelling role to play in this story. In contrast to Bridget, the new wife is not wealthy and therefore entirely dependent on her husband. This is illustrated with brutal clarity when she sees him hanged, shortly before she herself dies in childbirth: ‘When she closed her eyes for the last time it was gladly to escape from a world which had no future for her and her babe, who was buried with her.’ In pointed fashion, the reader sees how the justice system has gruesome consequences not just for those it punishes, but for others enmeshed in their fate. Fortune’s compassion for the Other Woman underscores the precarious position of many women in the colonies during the nineteenth century, their vulnerabilities compounded by their caregiving relations to sons and husbands in a way that was all too familiar from her own experience.

In Fortune’s stories, every character has a sense of depth and movement: rarely is a passer-by reduced to a footnote. She weaves a hefty quilt from a tattered social fabric stretching from the Victorian goldfields to the mean streets of Melbourne; widows, street urchins, workmates, and bereaved ex-lovers are instrumental in tracking down the perpetrators of crime. Fortune was one of the first crime writers to shed light on the ‘fitzgig’, paid street informers who would peddle information to detectives. The social breadth of her work is also evident in the story ‘Killed in the Shaft’, where a gold miner finds the dead body of his colleague. Eerily, the miner doesn’t seem to retell the story so much as allow the words to echo through him:

Here, the ‘hollowness’ of the phrase ‘Quite Dead’ speaks to both the inadequacy of words in describing such a tragedy and their haunting hold on him as they evoke, again and again, the reverberations of the empty mineshaft. Negative spaces such as ‘the bottom of the [mine] shaft’, which stand for narrative lacunae, abound in Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging. From the void emerges a sense of unplumbed depths, creating a sense of psychic space in which memory fills the silence and absence. Often in Fortune’s stories, we are never quite at the scene of violence or death, which are sketched in outline rather than described with realist fidelity, or shown through their psychological aftermath. They are impressionistic rather than forensic, underscoring the unreliability of memory and the uncanniness inherent in their retelling.

In the criminal underworld, the circulation of words can give them a life of their own. The same might be said to apply to publishing. In a strange parallel between fiction and biographical fact, the authors of Outrageous Fortunes note that: ‘Mary Fortune inhabits negative spaces, hidden in plain sight. She was absent from the many diaries and letters written during her times. When she died, no obituary appeared, and her death record took decades to find.’ Yet, as they observe, even though The Australian Journal did not publish a death notice for Fortune, they did employ several writers to continue her serials, which were so widely read and sorely missed that they remained circulating for decades after her passing.

Part of the appeal of Fortune’s writing, which could make local audiences feel at home while appealing to readers overseas, was the fact that it was as much at home in the country as in the city. As with many early Australian crime writers, Fortune dabbled in the Gothic, playing on a settler sense of estrangement from the natural landscape, but many of the landscapes she set her crime stories in are deceptively lush and idyllic. ‘The Midnight Watch’ begins: ‘Very beautiful is the green scattered “bush” of Australia. A thousand beauties may be freshly discovered, as it were, at every fresh mile of travel.’ She describes the birds and lizards in just as much detail as she does the human characters, noting that a magpie ‘utters those delicious gurgles of music that cannot be compared with the notes of any other bird in the wide world’. It’s the kind of sentence you can hear, to my mind, along with the taste of dry earth.

By including such detail, the authorial voice is akin to that of a guide to a foreign country. As a writer from Ireland, Fortune is looking at the Australian bush from the perspective of a migrant – an alienated viewpoint that seeks to bring a sense of homeliness that ultimately remains out of reach. Relatively unafflicted by homesickness or nostalgia, Fortune’s animals are often more important to her stories – more naturally domesticated guides – than the people in them. In ‘The Midnight Watch’, a team of cattle eventually leads the barmaid wife of the deceased to solve the mystery of his death. ‘“I knew my husband’s bullocks,”’ she tells the detective. ‘“We reared them ourselves, and I am as sure as I stand here that every one of them this moment would eat from my hand.”’ The intimacy between the bullocks and the widow could be seen as incidental, but it becomes integral to the denouement. The wife mentions that the police had previously given up on finding her husband, forcing her to pursue the matter on her own. Her alienation from land and community at such moments is palpable.

In their commentary on the story, Brown and Sussex note the telescoping of gendered gazes at work: ‘Fortune works on two levels here: the woman writing the male detective, who in turn observes a woman.’ This self-consciousness works in a literary and judicial context of a woman’s dependence on male observers to authorise her findings. In another short story, ‘The Stolen Deed’, a detective named Sinclair dresses up in women’s clothing to gossip with informers in what Brown and Sussex describe as ‘a multi-layered personal joke: a woman impersonating a man impersonating a woman’. This is what Mary Fortune’s fiction brings into view with panache: that a writer is a master of disguises – someone who crafts artful fictions to get at truths that might otherwise lie under social prohibition. To quote her fellow Irishman Oscar Wilde, whose life (1854-1900) roughly coincided with Fortune’s (1832-1911): ‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’

In many respects Fortune was a visionary in Australian letters. She was pioneering in her use of new media technology as actual and metaphoric devices in her stories. Their cinematic feel coincided with the arrival of moving pictures in Australia during 1896, when viewings would be put on with hand-operated projectors. In the short story ‘The Amateur Detective’ (1906), passages of dialogue and free indirect discourse are broken up by wordless moments that read like scenes from a silent film: ‘The light from the gas gleamed for a moment on many glittering things in the box, and so anxious was Con Blaney to get a sight of them that he inadvertently made a slight noise. The woman heard it, and turned a startled face towards the window.’ Such interludes allow tension to develop in the space between dialogue, where revelations so often unfurl in real life.

Fortune featured photography in her detective stories before it was widely employed in policing. ‘This new technology fixed identity, so that it became harder to do as she had and disappear for a new life’, write Brown and Sussex. ‘Pentridge Prison would photograph villains; so would the Victorian Detective Office. But Fortune’s fiction got there first.’ In ‘The Dead Witness’, the narrator describes himself as an amateur photographer, ‘quite at home among the chemicals, &c.’; and his observations from a discarded copperplate become instrumental in solving a murder.

Hers was also a career of remarkable longevity and productivity. Fortune’s detective stories would become the longest-running series of its time, and were eventually published in a collection titled The Detective’s Album, copies of which, according to Brown and Sussex, are now valued upwards of $25,000. Through Fortune’s eyes, these stories chart the progression of a penal colony into a state that continues to punish those who are already burdened by unforgiving circumstances. What this meant at a more personal level is apparent in other parts of her published oeuvre. Palpable anxiety for her imprisoned son is movingly evident in Fortune’s first publication, a poem titled ‘To My Little Son on his Birthday’, which appeared in the second issue of The Australian Journal, which first appeared in 1865 and was modelled on the London Journal. Fortune published almost a half century’s worth of work in The Australian Journal, including over 500 stories. When the journal assigned a different writer, a Mr A.C. Eiseman, to continue Fortune’s serial after her death, he struggled to keep up with her rate of publishing. As Brown writes in her chapter on Fortune for the collection, Changing the Victorian Subject, ‘Waif Wander’, as the journal’s most enduring writer, contributed a range of material, including ‘urban ethnography, romance, autobiography, Gothic serial fiction, poetry, […] recipe and detective fiction’, churning out 10,000 words every month.

Interestingly, The Australian Journal was the same periodical which serialised Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life. Brown and Sussex note that Clarke’s prose was often compared to that of Fortune, with readers speculating that W.W. was one of Clarke’s pseudonyms. More to the point is the double standard they observe as a result of Clarke’s and Fortune’s respective social standings. While ‘Marcus Clarke and his friends could be upper bohemians without great censure’, Brown and Sussex write, ‘a woman acquainted via her son and lovers with lower bohemia – the criminal classes – was compromised.’ Nevertheless, they ask whether there is any other Australian writer (of any gender) who has maintained ‘such a consistent presence in the cutthroat world of the periodical press as a paid writer’, even taking into account the economic downturn of the late nineteenth century. This was also a period when censorship was rife: in 1887, a shipment of books by Émile Zola was seized at Melbourne’s docks, while his publisher was charged with obscenity for Zola’s English translation. Some years later, in ‘“Pursuing Literature” in Australia’ (1899), Henry Lawson advised the promising young Australian author to ‘study elementary anatomy, especially as it applies to the cranium, and then shoot himself carefully with the aid of a looking glass’. This was not an easy time to be a writer.

There are parallels between the workings of the late nineteenth-century press detailed in Outrageous Fortunes and contemporary publishing practices: from subscription-based promotional strategies that seem to echo today’s push for pre-ordering and self-promotion through social media, to our cultural obsession with true crime. If Mary Fortune were alive today, would she have her own podcast? Would she have dispensed with traditional media and started a Substack? Would she have developed a cult following on sites like Archive of Our Own, where readers and fans might – like Eiseman – be enlisted to expand The Detective’s Album universe? Such questions – about print culture’s interaction with new media and genre – came to me frequently while reading Outrageous Fortunes, an inquisitive, conversational biography that prompts the reader to imagine Fortune as both an artist and a mother in all her contradictions, while asking how her work might be read today in the context of class inequality and carceral violence.

Crime writing remains a socio-political genre that often allows its audience to see the fuller context from which crime emerges. In Fortune’s case, the social upheaval of Victoria’s goldfields and its burgeoning capital city provide the background against which no one character is an isolated agent, merely a passive victim. While vengeance, deceit, and greed are present in the characters’ motivations, so too are poverty, loss, and homelessness – all recorded by a writer familiar with these things. Fortune’s writing is thus noteworthy from both a literary and a criminological perspective, and her legacy as a parent of an incarcerated child is particularly relevant. The Victorian government recently passed its ‘Adult Time for Violent Crime’ bill, allowing the state to incarcerate children as young as fourteen for more than twenty-five years, and, in some cases, even for life. In the Northern Territory, which has the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world after El Salvador, the government lowered the age of criminal responsibility from twelve to just ten years of age. Fortune’s stories – indeed, her story – remind us of how much is left unwritten in the stories of criminals as well as victims of crime, from what it’s like to grow up inside prisms of violence, mental ill health, and deprivation, to the institutional abuse and state brutality that all too often re-entrench rather than break patterns of recidivism. They remind us how some may never know the safety they are charged with threatening.