Shelley Burr’s “Wake,” which is out August 30, turns “Dirt Town” inside out. Where Scrivenor explores personal pain behind closed doors, Burr considers public frenzy – media-armed trauma and victimization. But the rural community that invented them is a Durton clone. Red earth, undergrowth, merciless heat. Burr’s Nannine is a colonial boomtown that has come to fruition. The old peasant dynasties sell their land to multinational conglomerates and the livestock jobs have disappeared. “The city had fallen back to a few essentials,” Burr writes, “and the main industry was now stubbornness.” Nannine’s only remaining claim to fame is that it’s the site of one of the country’s juiciest unsolved murders.
Here, the Australian outback is once again reduced to an evil, life-consuming adversary; a place of snakebites and skeletons; a rear impoundment; a horror theater. Australia’s nightmare.
Nineteen years ago, schoolgirl Evelyn McCreery was snatched from the bedroom she shared with her twin sister, Mina, on their parents’ remote sheep farm. The case has echoes of JonBenet Ramsey and Madeleine McCann, and has attracted an equally eerie circus: wild conspiracy theories, lecherous documentaries, a $2 million reward. An army of amateur Internet sleuths scans every little new detail and chases Mina – their prime suspect – from afar. The relentless control has made her an almost hermit. The farm is the only place where Mina feels safe, but it is probably the site of Evelyn’s murder, a cruel trap. Enter a police academy dropout, Lane Holland. He resembles a bounty hunter for different kinds of gardens – “one of the many who thought that his fascination for… [Mina’s] sister gave him some sort of entitlement’ – but he has a history of cracking cold cases and his own grim hunch.
As Lane lobbies Mina to get him examined, she’s reminded why her sister’s case is attracting so much attention: a golden-haired, ambitious beauty queen, plucked from the safety of a healthy, warm bed. Mina’s best friend also lost a sister, but a missing foster child with drug-addicted, law-breaking parents isn’t the kind of story that evokes national grief.
And so we have two politically savvy, cleverly plotted murder mysteries — the kind of books that invite the voracious language of binge-reading: compulsive, propulsive, addictive. But the nearly identical inventions of Scrivenor and Burr – Durton and Nannine – feel like a kind of evasion, a way of avoiding the responsibilities of dealing with Australia’s real and complex regional communities.
Like so many of their contemporaries, Burr and Scrivenor evoke cities largely devoid of history, culture, or even First Nations residents. And their shared premise, a disappeared white girl, plays on a vile colonial figure of speech: purity, cruelty and the quiet nobility of hardscrabble herders. The brave frontier. Here, the Australian outback is once again reduced to an evil, life-consuming adversary; a place of snakebites and skeletons; a rear impoundment; a horror theater. Australia’s nightmare. If we thought otherwise, we would face the true horrors in our history – all the other bodies buried in that red earth.
The narrative elegance of outback noir is undeniable: Like the grand mansion in English whodunits, the bushtown has a small cast locked in place as secrets and vendettas unravel. Tellingly, though, the places Aussie writers invent are often so geographically vague—so generally characterless, so uniformly deserted—that they can be put almost anywhere on the national map. (“Choose a capital and drive eight hours inland,” says Peter Papathanasiou, of the dusty spot he invented for his 2021 hit, “The Stoneing.”) It makes for an evocative thriller, but for those of us who grew up in remote and regional Australia, it’s not a place we particularly recognise.
