The 19th-century crime writer Mary Fortune has long been a source of fascination to author Lucy Sussex. After stumbling on her as a footnote in the history of Australian crime fiction, Sussex has devoted herself to giving this remarkable writer her due: as a brilliant journalist who captured life in colonial era Melbourne; as the author of more than 500 detective stories; and as an early woman writer in Australia whose name deserves not to be forgotten.
In 2017, Sussex was awarded a State Library fellowship to research the lives of Mary Fortune and her son, George – the outcome of which is the recently released book, Outrageous Fortunes: The Adventures of Mary Fortune, Crime-Writer, and Her Criminal Son.
‘She was an early female chronicler of Melbourne,’ explains Sussex. ‘She wrote these really vivid, really fresh autobiographical pieces about wandering through Melbourne, the difficulties of finding a job, trying to find lodgings, the eastern market – female-centric stories at a time when there were really not that many women journalists.’
Then there were her short stories, serialised in newspapers and the Australian Journal. Fortune wrote hundreds of fascinating police procedurals that took her readers into the world of beat cops and sly groggers, shady characters and the slums they inhabited, writing about Melbourne’s seedy underbelly during an era where middle-class women were meant to be paragons of feminine virtue.
‘She has the policeman's eye, the detective’s eye,’ says Sussex. ‘There's a lot of things that she knows too much about. She knows too much about informants, about sly grog on the goldfields, about distilling – she’s like a sponge for 19th-century Victoria, which she then puts into her journalism or stories.’
In trying to uncover Mary Fortune’s history, Sussex became a kind of detective herself. Over the course of her fellowship, she pored over 19th-century diaries and manuscripts and read reams of microfilm, prowling through the archives in search of clues. She cross-referenced Fortune’s memoirs with official documents like passenger lists and Births, Deaths and Marriages indexes, trying to glean where fact ended and fiction began (‘Her memoirs turned out to be really unreliable in parts,’ notes Sussex).
Combining sources held in the State Collection with material held in archives such as the Mitchell Library in Sydney and The University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special Collections, Sussex was able to reconstruct Fortune’s life and the world she lived in.
Research into the life of Fortune’s ill-fated son, George Fortune, was undertaken in collaboration with her co-author Megan Brown – a project that saw them delving into Tasmanian gaol archives.
‘She's the crime writer. He's the criminal. She writes about it. He lives it,’ says Sussex. ‘People know about Ned Kelly, but they don't know so much about someone who is in and out of jail all their life. It’s not as glamorous, but he did do a couple of major heists and ruined his life in the process.’
For Sussex, the Fellowships Program was instrumental in bringing the book to fruition: ‘What the Fellowship gives you is the time to focus on a subject,’ she says, noting with a laugh how useful it was to have a ‘tame reference librarian’ to help steer her research and provide advice on the Library’s extensive archives.
Sussex was thrilled to discover a direct link between Mary Fortune and the Library itself. In 1879, Fortune published an article in the Herald about visiting the Library and describing what she encountered there.
Her writing is wonderfully alive with detail: she observes the broad and shallow steps of the grand stone staircase, the women in the red-curtained privacy of the ladies reading room, the view from what is now The Ian Potter Queen’s Hall, where through the window she observes not skyscrapers as we’d see today, but ‘thousands of Melbourne rooftops’ and in the far distance, ‘a forest of masts’ of the ships docked at Williamstown.
For Sussex, the way Mary Fortune evoked the life of Melbourne was her greatest talent.
‘She's got a very keen eye for Melbourne. She wrote very vividly about something very ephemeral, because Melbourne was changing and so much of it has been lost,’ says Sussex.
‘A lot of these 19th-century writers use incredibly long and dull sentences, and she doesn't,’she says. ‘You could go for a walk and put on headphones of her journalism and get a very clear picture of what it was like, and what remains, and what she would have seen. It's like she's talking to you.’
Lucy Sussex and her co-author Megan Brown will be launching Outrageous Fortunes, as well as a new anthology of Mary Fortune’s short stories called Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging, at Readings State Library on Tuesday 11 February at 6.30pm.
First published at State Library Victoria, February 4, 2025
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