Great Australian World Firsts: The Things We Made, The Things We Did - Couverture souple

Spicer, Chrystopher J.

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1742376738 ISBN 13 : 9781742376738

Editeur : Allen & Unwin, 2012

Synopsis

Did you know that Australians were actually the first in the world to put wine in cardboard casks, explore both the Arctic and Antarctic by air, invent a portable pacemaker, manufacture and market the one-piece bathing suit, and develop the wire-guided missile? Australians are among the most outstanding innovators on the planet, leading the world in achievements across many fields such as sport, the arts, medicine, transport and exploration. Before Arthur Conan Doyle, Australia's own Mary Fortune was the first female author of detective fiction and one of the most prolific crime writers of the 19th century. The glowing fire of Australian opals would have probably remained unknown to the world gem market if it hadn't been for Tullie C. Wollaston. Kay Cottee was the first woman to complete a singlehanded nonstop circumnavigation of the world by sea, and long before the successes of Mark Webber there was Sir Jack Brabham, the first person to win a Formula One World Championship in a car that he designed himself. Great Australian World Firsts tells the stories of 30 remarkable Australians, many of whom are long overdue for recognition, and will delight and inspire with insights into unique human achievement.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Chrystopher J. Spicer teaches writing and communication at James Cook University in Queensland, and has been writing about Australian and American film and history for many years. He is the author of the acclaimed biography Clark Gable, lauded by Empire film magazine as "meticulously researched and respectful in approach." He was also a major contributor to the Encyclopedia of Melbourne.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

Great Australian World Firsts

The Things We Made, The Things We Did

By Chrystopher J. Spicer

Allen & Unwin

Copyright © 2012 Chrystopher J. Spicer
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-74237-673-8

Contents

Introduction, 
Part I: Arts, 
Waif Wander: Mary Fortune creates the detective before Sherlock Holmes, 
The wonderful, wonderful cat: Pat Sullivan and Felix, 
'I came to life wanting to paint': Nora Heysen, an artist of war and peace, 
Mad as hell and not going to take it any more: Peter Finch, actor, 
Part II: International Exploration, 
Aboriginal voyager: Bennelong (Woollarawarre), ambassador and international traveller, 
'I worshipped their beauty': Emmeline Freda Du Faur, mountaineer, 
'I felt liberated': Sir Hubert Wilkins, polar explorer and photographer, 
A tropical Queenslander on ice: John Hoelscher's circumnavigation of Greenland, 
'It's everyone's world': Kay Cottee and Blackmores First Lady circumnavigate the globe, 
Part III: Lifestyle, 
'One soweth; another reapeth': James Harrison and refrigeration, 
Australia's Edison: Henry Sutton, 
The opal man: Tullie C. Wollaston, the first to take Australian opals to the world, 
Sitting women: Vida Goldstein, Nellie Martel, Mary Ann Moore-Bentley and Selina Anderson, 
Go to work and do it: Eric Waterworth and the automatic record-changer, 
Chateau de Cardboard: Thomas W.C. Angove and the portable wine cask, 
The marlin and the pacemaker: Dr Mark C. Lidwill and his external cardiac pacemaker, 
Searching for her holy grail: Dr Fiona Wood and her quest for scarless healing, 
Part IV: Sport, 
Running black: Bobby McDonald and Charlie Samuels, Aboriginal sprinters, 
The perfect woman: Annette Kellerman, swimmer and movie star, 
The Cressy, the Lismore and the Red Seal: Alfred Alexander and his tennis racquets, 
The Guv'nor: Jack Brabham and his BT19 Formula One car, 
The track ahead: Geoff Healey and the RaceCam, 
The £10 bet: Michael O'Brien and the sporting streak, 
Part V: Transport, 
The missile and the monorail: Louis Brennan and his life of invention, 
Her skill and art are wondrous rare: Florence Mary Taylor, glider pilot, architect and town planner, 
'Theory is the captain, practice the soldiers': Anthony George Michell, Australia's James Watt, 
Tanked: Lancelot de Mole and his tracked vehicle Wired for sound: William T. Kelly, the Summit car and the first factory-installed car radio, 
Aviatrix: Jessie Miller, Australia's first long-distance airwoman, 
Sailing the sea road: The Empress of Australia, 
Acknowledgements, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

WAIF WANDER

Mary Fortune creates the detective before Sherlock Holmes

Firsts

• The first female writer of detective fiction

• Author of the longest-running nineteenth-century crime fiction series published in a periodical

• The most prolific known nineteenth-century crime writer

If you had been a reader of the popular magazine Australian Journal between 1865 and 1908, you would have been enthralled with the detective stories of a writer known as 'Waif Wander', or sometimes simply 'W.W.' If you were an avid reader of some of those 500 stories, then you might even have gone out and purchased a copy of that writer's collection of self-contained crime stories, The Detective's Album: Tales of the Australian police, published in 1871. Yet until well into the twentieth century, the author of these early detective stories was a complete mystery. Nobody knew who this writer was, or where they came from, or even their gender.

During the 1950s, the book collector J.K. Moir, realising W.W.'s importance to the history of crime writing, set out to solve the mystery of the writer's identity. In the course of his investigation, he found some manuscript poems and a letter addressed to a Minnie Furlong from about 1909, signed 'M.H. Fortune'. Then, in 1987, Lucy Sussex picked up Moir's magnifying glass and was able to prove that W.W. was indeed Mary Fortune, the first known female author of the detective fiction genre and the most prolific of any known nineteenth-century crime fiction writer. The Detective's Album series ran to some 500 stories published regularly for over forty years, the longest-running continuous series in the early history of crime fiction. By comparison, Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes appears in only fifty-six stories and four novels published at intervals during a similar time period.

Mary Fortune was born Mary Helena Wilson around 1833 in Belfast, Ireland, to George, a civil engineer, and his wife, Eleanor. Mary would later write in her story 'How I Spent Christmas' that she 'never knew either mother or sister or brother', so it would seem that her mother may not have survived Mary's birth. After moving with her father to Montreal, Canada, Mary married a young surveyor, Joseph Fortune, on 25 March 1851 and the following year bore a son named Joseph George, who she called Georgie. By now, news of the discovery of gold in Australia had arrived and Mary's father quickly left for the goldfields soon after Georgie was born. In 1855, Mary and Georgie travelled to join her father, sailing onboard the Bresias first to England and from there to Melbourne where they arrived in early October.

In a time before you could simply pick up the telephone and make a call, Mary had to wait in Melbourne for some weeks while she advertised in the personal column of the Argus to let her father know she had arrived. She put the days to good use, making copious notes of her observations of life in the city that would later appear in her 1880s memoir known as 'Twenty-Six Years Ago; or, the Diggings from '55'. Eventually, she joined her father near Castlemaine on the Kangaroo Flat goldfields where he had become a general storekeeper, and she seemed to enjoy the tough life there.

A short time later, they abruptly moved to Buninyong, where Mary gave birth to another son in 1856; his birth went officially unrecognised for eight months. When he was finally registered, it was as Eastbourne Vawdrey Fortune and his father was listed as Joseph Fortune. As it is highly unlikely that Joseph had suddenly and mysteriously arrived from Canada, Mary seems to have used his name to conceal the identity of the real father to whom she might not have been married. So there may have been some good reasons why Mary would use a pseudonym such as 'Waif Wander' in an era when a woman's reputation had to be carefully protected.

When she left Canada, Mary had been commissioned to write a series of articles for The Ladies' Home Companion magazine, but she had to abandon that because it was just not economically viable. After all, fifteen shillings per article didn't go far when you had two young children to support. By 1858, Mary and her sons were living in Kingower and she would find this year in particular to be one of mixed sadness and joy. Her dear Georgie died in January, but in October Mary married the new local mounted police constable, Percy Rollo Brett, at Dunolly. Mary described herself as a widow on the marriage certificate but did not give the date of her husband's death, nor did she list the names of her children. Percy, for his part, overstated his age by four years at 24. Perhaps not surprisingly, their joy in this odd partnership was short-lived. Unfortunately, Percy was dismissed from the police force at the end of the year, apparently because he over-reacted to a comment about his stepson's parentage, and he promptly found himself in the uncomfortable position of being an unemployed cop in a small country town with a wife whose moral reputation was a little tarnished.

Their situation must have put a lot of pressure on their relationship, and it eventually broke down under the strain. Percy left town, and by 1862 he was working as a stock-dealer in Jerilderie in New South Wales. He eventually purchased farmland at Urana and married a prominent citizen's daughter, with whom he'd eloped, without obtaining a divorce from Mary.

Meanwhile, by 1865 Mary had moved to the Victorian mining town of Jericho (now Wehla) where a copy of the Melbourne magazine Australian Journal caught her eye one day; perhaps its strong crime flavour reminded her of life with Percy. Mary had already been writing for about ten years by now, submitting pseudonymous contributions to various goldfield newspapers such as the Buninyong Advertiser. However, she had found out from experience that it was not always a good idea to reveal her gender; the Mount Alexander Mail, for example, had once offered her a sub-editor's position after admiring her poetry only to withdraw the proposal in shock when they discovered their correspondent was actually a woman. So she sent in her first story to the Journal, for which she had fallen back on her knowledge of police procedure, under the pseudonym of 'An Australian Mounted Trooper', and to her delight it was published in late 1865 under the title 'The Stolen Specimens'.

Evidently the Journal liked Fortune's work; it quickly teamed her with one of their staff writers, James Skipp Borlase, to jointly produce the first detective series published in Australia. However, after nine stories together Borlase was dismissed for plagiarism so Fortune tried her hand at some other styles of serialised novel until the Journal decided in 1867 to renew the original series under the title The Detective's Album with Fortune as the sole author, using the pseudonym 'W.W.' According to Lucy Sussex's research, during the following year alone Fortune published three poems, fourteen short stories and three serialised novels — she also began a fourth. By Christmas Day 1868, she and her son were living in Melbourne and, despite being poor, she could write that she was independent and supporting herself through her writing — although, given the woeful rate paid for magazine stories in those days, she must have supplemented her income somehow, such as by taking in boarders. Her only book, published in 1871 as The Detective's Album, contained seven of the stories published under that collective title and was the first detective fiction book published in Australia.

A writer's life is an unpredictable roller-coaster, though, as Fortune was soon reminded. In 1871, the same year her book was published, her son Eastbourne was taken into custody as a neglected child and sent to the Industrial (Reform) School in Sunbury, later the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum and now part of the Victoria University campus. Unfortunately, and somewhat ironically given the subjects of Mary's stories, young Eastbourne became a regular guest at some of Her Majesty's more secure residences for a large part of his life, finally doing ten years after being sentenced for burglary in 1890. His arrest record reveals that within a short time Fortune had lost her independence to become a resident of the Melbourne Immigrants' Home, an institution that provided accommodation for the destitute, which explains why Eastbourne was running wild in the streets. In short, despite being one of Australia's most successful published authors, Mary Fortune was homeless.

Still, she kept on writing. Her last serialised novel, The Bushranger's Autobiography, appeared in the Australian Journal between 1871 and 1872. After that, her writing was devoted almost exclusively to the crime stories that appeared in virtually every issue of that magazine. For almost forty years, Fortune would write twelve short stories a year as part of the Detective's Album series, although some longer ones came closer to being novelettes, usually following the same format: a collection of mug shots through which Detective Mark Sinclair browses, reminiscing about criminals, cases and how they were solved. Fortune's work thus pioneers the form of crime writing that came to be known as 'police procedural'. Sinclair's lively and colloquial voice addresses the reader directly and, judging from some of her other writing, it seems to be very much Fortune's voice. She had a keen eye for character description and mannerisms, and for the particular styles of conversation and nuances of vocabulary used by various social groups.

No matter how much writing talent one has, though, a rate of production that intense eventually has to take its toll, and so it's probably not surprising that alcohol became Fortune's friend. After all, as the editor of the Australian Journal Ron Campbell observed in 1952: 'She wrote more, and doubtless got less for it, than any other Australian writer of the time.' Ironically, the only description of Fortune that has survived appears in a report in the Police Gazette of 10 February 1874, where she is recorded as being at that time aged 40, tall, pale and thin, dressed in a dark jacket and skirt and wearing a black hat and old elastic-sided boots. Even then, the report states, she was 'much given to drink and has been locked up several times for drunkenness'.

By the time she wrote the letter to Minnie Furlong that was located many years later by J.K. Moir, Fortune's failing eyesight had ended her writing career. She was living in poverty, reduced to wearing clothes that Minnie had given her, and her troubled Eastbourne had died in Tasmania two years previously. However, the Australian Journal continued to reprint her earlier stories and then maintained the Detective's Album series with stories by other writers. In a remarkable act of kindness, with perhaps a touch of guilt, the Journal sent the elderly Fortune an annuity until her death and then paid for her burial expenses. The date of her death and where she is buried remain Mary Fortune's last mysteries.

* * *

The rest of the world

Edgar Allan Poe became the first notable early detective fiction writer with his 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' in 1841, the first of his trio of stories featuring the Parisian detective Dupin. Charles Dickens was responsible for Britain's first literary detective: Inspector Bucket in the 1852 Bleak House. The first Australian murder-mystery novel was Force and Fraud: A tale of the bush, written by Ellen Davitt, head of the Ladies Institute of Victoria school for governesses and a sister-in-law of Anthony Trollope, writing under the name Mrs Arthur Davitt. Her novel was serialised in Australian Journal, beginning in its first issue in 1865, but was not published in book form until 1993 and so is usually unrecognised for its significance. It did not feature a detective.

In England, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, whose brother Edward became a premier of Tasmania, was an early female mystery writer famous for her novel Lady Audley's Secret (1862). She later founded the Belgravia Magazine in 1866.

Catherine Louisa Pirkis wrote many short stories and fourteen novels after 1877 in England. These included stories published in Ludgate Magazine in 1894 featuring the professional detective Miss Loveday Brooke, who works for the Ebenezer Dyer detective agency, often undercover. Pirkis then abandoned her writing for work with the National Canine Defence League, which she had co-founded in 1891.

Although there were earlier suspense or mystery writers, the versatile Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, who used the name Seeley Regester, is the author of the first known American detective novel, The Dead Letter, which featured the amateur gentleman detective Mr Burton. Serialised in Beadle's Monthly in 1866, the chapters were published as a novel the following year by Victor's husband, Orville James Victor, head of dime-novel publishing company Beadle & Adams.

However, Anna Katherine Green is probably the best-known early American female detective fiction author, with her novel The Leavenworth Case published in 1878. Her father was a criminal lawyer who no doubt was the source of some inspiration. She was probably also the first female detective writer to feature leading characters who were female detectives: Violet Strange and Amelia Butterworth. The aristocratic Butterworth first appeared in 1897 in That Affair Next Door.

CHAPTER 2

THE WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL CAT

Pat Sullivan and Felix

Firsts

• The first animated cartoon series starring an anthropomorphic animal character

• The first cartoon character to become a fully merchandised celebrity star

• The first cartoon animal to appear on television

If you had been driving around Los Angeles in the mid-1920s, you would probably have seen Chevrolet dealer Winslow Felix going by in his convertible painted with cartoons of the famous character Felix the Cat and perhaps with a giant Felix head sitting on the back seat. His briefcase was emblazoned with a Chevrolet logo and the words 'Order Yours from Felix'. Winslow was a friend of the Australian cartoon studio owner Pat Sullivan who, in exchange for a free car, had let him use the image of Felix as a marketing tool. In 1959, the W. Heath Company designed and erected a huge neon sign featuring Felix the Cat above the Felix Chevrolet dealership building on the corner of Figueroa Street and Jefferson Boulevard in Los Angeles, where it can still be seen today.

Long before then, Felix the Cat had become the most famous cat in the world. Not only could he be seen on the screen but also in books and newspapers, as dolls and figurines, on pencils, money boxes, bedroom slippers, ties, china, and even on Felix cigars. During World War II, British children's gas masks appeared with Felix on them. Having been revived in recent years, Felix is still with us, but what many people don't know is that his fame and creation were closely tied to an Australian: the artist, producer and animation studio owner Pat Sullivan.

Named after his father, well-known Sydney hansom cab driver Patrick O'Sullivan, the young Pat was born in Paddington in 1886, had a sound Catholic education and then studied art at night at the Art Society of New South Wales while working as a Toohey's Brewery gate-keeper. By way of earning some money on the side, he became a pianola demonstrator in Sydney and then toured a bioscope show with his brother Bill, while selling caricatures of sport celebrities in barbershops and even drawing a few quick portraits. When he was eighteen he found a regular job as an artist on the Worker, but by then the wider world was calling. O'Sullivan left Australia for England, where he found it convenient to appear less obviously Irish by dropping the 'O' from his name. It didn't help him find a job, though, and he was reduced to walking up and down Fleet Street knocking on newspaper doors looking for work and sleeping on park benches at night. Finally he found a job drawing for Ally Sloper and some other papers before even that came to an end with the death of King Edward VII in May 1910. Back in those more mannered times, the death of royalty meant extended public mourning, during which time publishing funny cartoons just wasn't the done thing.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Great Australian World Firsts by Chrystopher J. Spicer. Copyright © 2012 Chrystopher J. Spicer. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Allen & Unwin
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1742376738
• ISBN 13: 9781742376738
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 324
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible