The opening pages of Chris Hammer’s debut 2018 crime novel Scrublands could be notes at the top of a film script: everything is described, nothing is internal. “The sky is cloudless and unforgiving, the sun punishing”, as parishioners in a small town gather for church. Then the priest emerges with a rifle and calmly executes five men. One shot each.
This is also the first scene of the TV adaptation of Scrublands, which, like Jane Harper’s 2016 The Dry, was set in a drought-afflicted expanse of rural Victoria. Harper’s debut became a film in 2020 and fellow former reporter Hammer’s first novel is the latest outback noir bestseller to get the screen treatment.
Made for the Australian streaming service Stan, the series is as cinematic as the opening of the book. The location helps: the real site of the story’s fictional country seat of Riversend is Maldon, a well-preserved gold-rush town. Scrublands’ cinematographer Marden Dean conjures the setting into the show’s most immediate virtue: this thing looks magnificent.
A year on from the murders at the church, Martin Scarsden, an improbably hot-looking newspaper journalist (he’s played by Luke Arnold, best-known for playing Michael Hutchence in the INXS biopic Never Tear Us Apart), is dispatched by his editor to write a colour piece on Riversend’s recovery from its trauma. It’s beneath him, but it’s a while since he had a good investigative scoop.
Unlike Maldon (which has an art show, a folk festival and a tourist trade), Riversend isn’t doing well. Even the pub has closed and the only place to get a beer is the local Chinese restaurant. Scarsden soon meets the improbably beautiful Mandy Bond (Bella Heathcote, Pieces of Her) and it’s immediately clear there will be romantic tension and a secret to unearth.
There are some fairly well-worn tropes here and the odd moment of implausibility – journalists usually make a few phone calls before driving into strange towns to randomly meet people – but, as Arnold observed recently, it’s less a formula whodunnit than a “whydunnit”.
Parts of the question are answered in lightly sepia-washed flashbacks, which show Father Byron Swift, the murderous priest (Kiwi actor Jay Ryan, Creamerie), as a thoughtful and sensitive newcomer to the town. Bond doesn’t believe the widely accepted story that he became a killer after being accused of abusing children. Scarsden, hauled back to the town by an accident as he’s trying to leave with his puff piece (for which he doesn’t seem to have been able to interview anyone) calls his editor to say he thinks he’s on to a real story here. It does indeed turn out there’s a reason Father Byron is more buff than any priest you’ve ever seen and keeps a rifle in his church.
The pacing of Scrublands’ revelations is measured and there’s a clarity to it that’s not always there in twisty TV mysteries. That may speak to Hammer’s own 30-year background as a journalist (he’d just embarked on the customary late-career switch into political comms when the novel took off). He has given the world-weary journalist Scarsden a run in two further novels, Silver and Trust, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if they translated to the screen as well as his first. They’ll probably want to keep that cinematographer on, though.
Streaming: The full season of Scrublands is on ThreeNow from December 2.
