Mary Fortune – The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole

Mary Lord, in her introduction to The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories, notes that Australian literature began to flower in the 1890s when writers of confidence and international stature began to emerge. It is not coincident that this efflorescence of talent happened as the push for nationhood gained in intensity (and would finally be realised in 1901). Mary Fortune, writing in 1866 as the “Waif Wanderer” in order to hide her gender, possesses a great gift for describing the Australian bush, but fails, at least in The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole when it comes to plotting, narrative tension, and characterisation.

Let's dispense with the plot immediately:

The facts of the case were shortly these: A young photographic enthusiast, in search of colonial scenery upon which to employ his art, had taken a room in a public house at the township of Kooama...one day this young artist, whose name was Edward Willis, left Kooama, and returned no more.

The young artist has been murdered – of this there is no question. Nor, really, is there any problem in discovering who the murderer is. The detective, Brooke, stumbles upon Thomas Derrick while exploring the vast bushlands around Kooama. Thomas Derrick, quite conveniently, is able to provide a more than generous hint as to the probably murderer. Then, evidence in the photographer's room points to a certain area where “Dick the Devil” resides. Lastly, Dick the Devil himself oozes criminality and murder from every pore and, even better, is more than happy to confess. This is the plot, and how Fortune takes us from the first part to the last is rather ordinary and uninteresting. He may be called a detective, but he doesn't do much sleuthing. The mystery, such as it is, is solved in spite of the detective instead of because of him.

There is a small scene, near to when Dick the Devil confesses, that shifts the plot of the story in a way that doesn't quite work, but nonetheless provides an interesting counterpart to the humdrum primary narrative. While the detective and Dick discuss the murder with increasingly aggressive posturing and exclamations, a sound emerges from a nearby waterhole:

A fearful, dripping thing rose to the surface – a white, ghastly face followed – and then, up – up – waist high out of the water, rose the corpse of the murdered artist!

It remained for a second or two standing, as it were, before us, with glaring, wide-open eye-balls turned toward the bank on which we stood, and then, with a horrible plump, the body fell backward, the feet rose to the top, and there the terrible thing lay face upward, - staring up, one might fancy, to the heavens, calling for justice on the murderer!

Brooke provides a half-hearted “scientific” explanation for the corpse's rise during the final sentences of the story, but it is clear that this, here, is the true mystery of the narrative. Unfortunately, Mary Fortune doesn't do much of anything with this tantalising glimpse of the mysterious and macabre, instead relegating it to the position of secondary importance to that of the murder. It's a shame, because the above quoted carries with it an almost gothic sensibility, and is, unlike the rest of the story, tense and unpredictable.

Fortune's true talent emerges as a side-note throughout the story; it is for her description of the bush that she should be remembered. She was one of the first writers to truly love the Australian landscape, to appreciate it for its differences from Europe and to embrace these differences as a thing that could be beautiful. Her descriptions, which fit into the narrative where they “should”, if we consider that a generic mystery story such as this follows a standard blue-print (it does), rise far, far above their status as placeholder text between Plot Point A and Discussion B. In one such passage, she writes:

It was a truly beautiful bit of entirely Australian bush scenery; a steep rocky bank for a background; at its foot, a still, deep waterhole reflecting every leaf of the twisted old white-stemmed gum trees that hung over it and dipped their heavy branches in its dark waters, and to the left a reach of bush level, clustered with undergrowth on the slightly undulating ground, and shaded here and there with the tufty foliage of the stringy-bark.

And this is something we've never read from an Australian writer before. There is a depth of feeling to this description, a belief that the Australian outback possesses inherently positive qualities, and that these qualities deserve to be captured in writing.

It is difficult to properly encapsulate the importance of Fortune's writing as a stepping stone to national confidence and genuineness in literature. Prior to her work (and a few other luminaries), Australia possessed a shabby literary culture, with writers who aped their foreign (usually British) counterparts because their own nation “wasn't good enough” to be written about. Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson would take another, more permanent and profound step forward than Fortune, but second steps require a first if they are to exist at all.

The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole, like last week's The Ghost Upon the Rail by John George Lang, is less important today for its literary merits than its historical importance, but even when considering that it is by far the more enjoyable text to read than Lang's admittedly clumsy prose. Fortune's talents lie in description and her emphatic love for Australia, but her plot, while ordinary and pedestrian, aren't exactly bad, either. In saying that I do not wish to damn with faint praise - The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole is sufficiently interesting to warrant attention but, like many first-runners, it merely shows the way forward, and doesn't necessarily itself tread warily into these unknown vistas.

The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole by Mary Fortune is a short story from the The Penguin Best Australian Stories, edited by Mary Lord.

Author	Mary Fortune
Title	The Dead Witness; or, the Bush Waterhole
Nationality	Australian
Publisher	Penguin
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond (AU)

See Also

Other stories from the The Penguin Best Australian Short Stories include:
---1859: Lang, John George - The Ghost Upon the Rail
---1873: Clarke, Marcus - Pretty Dick

Index of short stories under review