Tag: Tangled Vine

Did you know that an Australian was the first to invent the portable pacemaker? How about the fact that it was an Aussie who first explored both the Arctic and Antarctic by air? Well, these and other firsts have made their way into a first of its own: a book called Great Australian World Firsts by Chrystopher J. Spicer. In the book, Spicer covers a slew of Aussie firsts, ranging from the mundane to the mesmerizing. Australia’s own Mary Fortune was the first female author of detective fiction and one of the most prolific crime writers of the nineteenth century, preceding even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in making a splash in the genre.