A flat, dry landscape stretches beyond a cow skull staring up from the cracked mud, as the rusted tin blades on a disused windmill scrape around in the hot air. In the distance, a ruddy-faced farmer holds secrets behind his failed wheat crop. Somewhere, there’s a dead body, and when it’s discovered all hell will break loose in the small town up the road.
Welcome to outback noir. You know the scene so well you could probably have a crack at plotting out the rest of this story; yet ditching the tropes might just land you a book deal.
Rural or outback noir has been packing the bestseller lists for almost a decade. It changed author Jane Harper’s life overnight with the publication of The Dry (2016), and broke a long sales drought for prolific novelist Garry Disher.
According to Chris Hammer, bestselling author of Scrublands, this subgenre of crime fiction (claimed to be the world’s highest-selling genre) is one driver of an “international appetite” for Australian fiction. Sales data is hard to come by, but the boom has left our publishing industry with the distinct reddish hue of a dust storm.
As a rural noir writer who lives on the western side of the Great Dividing Range (it might surprise readers how few of us actually live out here), one of the clues that this trend might be permanent is in the increased diversity of writers and characters as this subgenre digs deeper.
Darug Burruberongal writer Julie Janson’s rural crime debut, Madukka: The River Serpent, was released in 2022. Janson’s investigator is freshwater Gamilaraay woman Aunty June, nemesis of cops and water cheats in the fictitious town of Wilga on Barkadji Country in far-west New South Wales. She blew like a willy-willy through the Australian literary scene before Janson was longlisted for the Miles Franklin literary award.
Mainstream Indigenous crime writing is rare but it feels like it shouldn’t be, because Aunty June has more at stake than Miss Marple and DCI Vera Stanhope combined.
“I wanted to celebrate the older women who I love; the feisty, courageous, outspoken, sexy, outrageous and beautiful Aboriginal women that I know,” Janson wrote. “Women who keep their families and communities together and are powerful spiritual and political beings.”
Yet she didn’t set out to write rural noir.
“The novel began as a social history story, but I worked with an excellent editor, Kate Goldsworthy, who agreed with me that the story led itself to adaptation to crime,” Janson said.
Peter Papathanasiou’s debut, The Stoning, was published in 2021.
Featuring DS Georgios Manolis, an investigator who is the son of Greek immigrants, the book centres around a shocking murder in a town where one local character claims “there’s no Aussie faces any more”.
“As the child of migrants and grandchild of refugees, the treatment of ‘new arrivals’ is a topic close to my heart,” Papathanasiou wrote.
The author admitted the subject matter was a risk. “It touches on many hot-button issues within society that can be both controversial and divisive,” he said. “This is not a story of which Australia will be proud, but which I feel must be told.”
I felt a similar dilemma after a literary gatekeeper dealt me a very stark rejection while I was pitching my outback noir manuscript to Australian publishers. “Rural crime is hitting a point of saturation with publishers,” she warned back in early 2019. “I sincerely hope that someone has the room and the vision to pick it up.”
Writing gurus advise against trying to chase genre “storms” for this very reason, although, like Janson, I never set out to write a crime novel. My story had taken years of research and exploration to capture Australia’s troubling gay-hate crime wave, yet by the end of that year it was languishing in slush piles across the country.
But all I had to do was wait, because there are independent publishers, like those who published Janson and Papathanasiou, with one eye out for diverse voices in classic rural noir storytelling.
Writing in the genre does require a certain narrative structure, even as the characters and stories diversify.
“The one trope that I needed to acknowledge from the genre was ‘start with a body’,” Janson wrote. “I had to kill someone off.”
So Janson created Thommo, Aunty June’s nephew, who disappears as Madukka opens and returns to her in a prescient vision of his murder.
Killing a marginalised character is difficult, considering they so commonly get it in the neck that their death itself has become a trope. I was conscious of the bury your gays trope in killing my queer victim, so I created James Brandt, a gay journalist who comes back to his home town to flush out the truth.
Some might reckon that Janson, Papathanasiou and I have gotten away with murder by having diverse investigators on the trail of diverse victims, although we’re just representing Australia’s rural population, something that’s also been observed in America’s southern gothic genre.
Looking back to 2011, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people comprised just 1% of the population in major cities, yet accounted for 15% in remote areas and 49% in very remote areas. That should have resulted in a far greater presence of Indigenous characters in the heartland of outback noir by now.
Australian data from 2022–23 shows an increase of 86.3% in regional migrants (primarily Indian, Nepalese and Filipino nationals), so by rights we should start seeing more diverse faces in rural noir character lists; and LGBTQ+ have been visible in Woop Woop for some time.
Rural crime fiction is flourishing in the hands of several champions of diversity, including Dinuka McKenzie, RWR McDonald and Hayley Scrivener. And when original rural noir screenplays such as Mystery Road and the recent High Country skip the novel format and hand wider agency to diverse characters right in our living rooms, it should inspire all Australian publishers. Readers are clearly ready for more.
Michael Burge is a Deepwater-based writer. His debut novel, Tank Water, was released by MidnightSun Publishing. He is a board member of the BAD Sydney crime writers’ festival
