by Moira McAlister (nee Barry-Cotter)
Dr Barry Cotter was the first doctor in Melbourne, arriving on the Norval with John Batman in November 1835. His was an interesting life and well documented through the Historical Records of Victoria, newspaper reports, official correspondence and other sources. In 2015 I published the website, Dr Barry Cotter: The first doctor in Melbourne which tells his story and references all my research. This website is updated regularly and freely available to read at drbarrycotter.com I also wrote a profile for the PPPG publication Pioneer Profiles which appears in Volume 6.
Dr Cotter married Inez Seville Fitzgerald in Melbourne in January 1838 and their marriage lasted six years and produced four children. Inez, like most women of the 19th century, left little evidence of her life, but the few facts I found were startling and unexpected and pointed to a strong woman, bound by the conservative attitudes of her time. It was an age when women were powerless, when they were legally owned by husbands and fathers with few rights and limited opportunities for financial independence. Inez’s determination to survive and educate her four children after being repeatedly abandoned by the men in her life was a story, I felt, worth telling.
It is a story set against a backdrop of iconic events of the 19th century – the first illegal settlement of Melbourne, the Irish Famine, the First Anglo-Sikh War and the Great Exhibition in London in 1850. Izzy, the fictionalised reinvention of Inez, is faced with a series of challenges that test her strength, all of which are based on fact. At times she is nearly beaten but she gathers strength and meets these challenges with perseverance. Her resilience wins through.
Writing fiction based on facts is a tricky business. Facts gleaned through birth, marriage and death certificates, shipping and census records, property purchases etc, tell only part of the story and alone will provide a dry tale. The record that a person lived in this place or travelled on that ship or married this person is evidence of the fact and describes the action, but it doesn’t provide the motivation for the action.
For example, we might presume that a marriage certificate meant that the couple was in love. But at times in the Australian colonies, men outnumbered women by 20 to 1, so there were many reasons for a couple to marry – security and respectability for women, housekeeping and companionship for men. Love was not always the prompt to marriage.
We can only relate to people of the past through our shared human condition and to really believe and know them as real people we need to find common human links with them. These links exist in what are sometimes called ‘universals’, those hundreds, perhaps thousands of human
traits that surpass race, culture, distance and most especially in this case, time. Human beings are always human beings. They laugh, cry, love, hate, despair, murder. They are puffy with self- importance. They can show incredible courage or tenderness or fear. These universals are a powerful way for a writer to connect a character with a reader. People are always people and how they relate to each other is the basis of all literature. The tricky part here is to identify the ‘right’ or at least the most feasible motivation, given the surrounding facts.
The next tricky thing is the linking of facts. Using fiction to ‘fill in the bits’ between the facts can result in a patchy, disjointed story unless the author does her work thoroughly. To me, the facts were like lampposts on a dark road, illuminating just a small space around them. I could see the next lamppost in the distance but needed to employ plausible and well researched, but fictitious characters, actions and motivations to get there. This is the image that sustained me throughout the writing of Izzy. The real research for this book was not so much about her life, (I had already completed most of that for the website in 2015). The real research was about the world that Inez lived in – the social history –manners, protocols, fashion along with the events that she witnessed, the industrial and technological progress of the 19th century and a hundred other aspects. This information became the plausible background, the believable world, so the reader is not simply focused on the protagonist but is fully and seamlessly immersed in the world in which she lives.
This leads to the third tricky aspect which is the people. Many of the characters in Izzy are historical figures and their lives are well documented – John Batman, JP Fawkner, William Buckley, Charles La Trobe – I have used their true names because they are acting within their historical role and I have no assigned any other motivations to them. What they say and do is factual. Others are purely fictional like Mrs. Betts, Madam Foveaux, Harriet and Sarah and their task is to give direction to the story when I did not have any facts to rely upon (i.e., between the lampposts). Even then, these characters are an amalgamation of similar characters I had researched – nannies, milliners, teachers etc. The third group of characters is comprised of those who are based on fact – Izzy, Bryn, Nell, Francis, Mary Parkins, Captain Bradley and others. I found that by using fictional names I was liberated to explore their motivations more freely, free to really create them as full characters. Their words and actions are in keeping with the known facts but not bound by them.
As with all fiction, readers expect to be entertained. Diverging from the ‘true’ story in the interests of plot, structure or tension is part and parcel of fiction writing. Readers want a good story, action, believable characters, a twist perhaps, a satisfying resolution, something to think about. With historical fiction, readers want all that while being transported to another time and place. The era, events, settings and characters may or may not be familiar and the author’s task is to create that world as authentically as possible.
Using ancestors as the main characters is fraught with difficulties. Family stories often contain a grain of truth but they are not facts and relying on them is shaky ground. Research is necessary to confirm or discount such stories. I found that because I had already researched and written the
factual, biographical story of Dr Cotter and Inez, I was free to explore the likely motivations and see the facts from Inez’s perspective. The goal of fiction is to distil the essence of the characters in order to tell their stories. I see the two publications as bookends, both holding the truth about this extraordinary couple.
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For more information about Moira McAlister, visit her website,