Darwin and the Northern Territories, or just NT, are just about as remote as you can get in Australia – you’re basically, once you get across the Torres Island Straits, up near Papua New Guinea. You’re looking at the Timor Sea and the Gulf of Carpentaria – and let’s early on note Alexis Wright’s novel 2006 Carpentaria which, while not strictly crime, is about argumentative conflicts between the aboriginal people in the area and the violence brought to the region by large-scale mining companies. Carpentaria won the prestigious Australian literary award, the Miles Franklin, in 2007.
The NT covers 520,385 square miles but with a population of barely 250,000 (approximately one per cent of Australia’s total population!), over half of whom live in the territory’s capital, the coastal city of Darwin, with most of the rest in and around the inland town of Alice Springs. About a quarter of the territory’s population is aboriginal. A huge place with not a lot of people, but still a great crime writing tradition….
“Outback Noir” has become a global phenomenon to rival Gothic Noir or Tartan Noir in the last decade. Crime readers who’ve never been anywhere near Oodnadatta, Tibooburra or any Aussie Outback towns, let alone Australia itself have become familiar with the small town infighting, machinations, and murders thanks to authors like Jane Harper, Peter Papathansiou, Chris Hammer and Patricia Wolf. Australian TV has adapted many of these – Mystery Road, High Country, Scrublands….
So here’s some NT Noir….
Matt Nable’s Still (2021) is set in Darwin, in the summer of 1963 and a body found in shallow marshland. The cast of characters includes Outback cowboys and local cops amid the tangled mangroves and half-dead pubs of the region, which didn’t exactly get to see the Swinging Sixties. Darwin’s history also runs through Judy Nunn’s Territory (2002) where priceless treasure lost in the sixteenth century when a Dutch ship, the Batavia, is wrecked off the West Australian coast and the survivors rescued by local aborigines. Into this comes the story of the Galloway family, station (massive farms in the NT) owners, and the story of Darwin itself, from the day it was bombed by Japanese fighter planes during World War Two (Darwin was where the Japanese intended to land and conquer Australia).
Also, not quite your usual crime novel, but well worth a read, is Megan Jacobson’s The Build-Up Season (2017). Seventeen-year-old Ily is growing up with a violent father and abused mother. Consequently, she doesn’t know how to do relationships, family or friends. Then her love-hate friendship with Max turns into a prank war and she nearly destroys her first true friendship with fellow misfit Mia. A tale set atmospherically against the humid build-up to Darwin’s wet season (which stretches from November to April with a yearly average 62 inches of rain giving the region its often lush environment in the north).
More in the vein of recent Outback Noir is Kerry McGinness’s Bloodwood Creak. A killer is roaming the roads of the NT picking up strangers (missing backpackers, tourists and solo travellers are a staple of Outback Noir stories). One missing girl’s cousin searches every road stop and tourist trap she can find south of Darwin for the man the media have dubbed ‘The Outback Killer’. Bloodwood Creek is a real trawl through the small towns and remote spots of the NT.
Philip Gwynne’s The Build Up (2008) – Detective Dusty Buchanon, a female cop in the very male world of the Northern Territory Police Force, finds herself in the stifling pre-monsoon trying to identify a body found in a billabong (for non-Aussies – ‘a pond or pool of water that is left behind when a river alters course or after floodwaters recede’ – near a Vietnam veterans’ camp site. To Dusty it’s the chance she’s been looking for: a spectacular case to revive her flagging career.
If you’re looking for a series set in the Northern Territories and around Darwin, then SR White’s Detective Dana Russo books do the job. The series starts with Hermit (2021). In the Outback Detective Russo finds a dead body and the prime suspect is a man who disappeared without trace 15 years earlier. In Prisoner (2022) a corpse is found ‘crucified’ amidst a murky swamp in northern Australia. The victim is a convicted rapist, just released from prison. The killer might seem obvious, but Russo digs deeper. Arguably White’s Dean Russo series really took off with the public with the third book in the series – Red Dirt Road (2023) — In Unamurra, a drought-scarred, one-pub town deep in the outback, two men are savagely murdered a month apart — their bodies elaborately arranged like angels. It seems likely a local committed the murders, but the investigation is stalled. Russo is called in to restart it. And finally White Ash Ridge (2024). It’s a boiling Outback heatwave and White Ash Ridge s a small hotel nestled in the Australian wilderness. Five guests – one murdered – four suspects.
Australia is a major producer and consumer of true crime. The Northern Territories is no exception. So we should mention Dan Box’s The Man Who Wasn’t There (2023) about a young Indigenous man who claims he was wrongly convicted of murder in the Northern Territory. Box, a journalist, himself becomes a character in a complicated, self-aware story about family tragedy around Zak Grieve, who grew up in an outback town, and was convicted of murder despite even the judge saying he wasn’t there when it happened.
And finally, something a little different. Benjamin Stevenson’s original and funny Everyone on This Train Is a Suspect (2024) The conceit is that an Australian Mystery Writers’ Society has invited six authors to a festival aboard the Ghan – the famous Darwin to Adelaide train – 53 hours 15 minutes to travel the 1,851 miles. The invited authors are a who’s who of crime writing royalty, and Stevenson, a lowly debut author. The others include a forensic science writer, a blockbuster writer, a legal thriller writer, a more literary writer and a psychological suspense writer
But when one of the authors is murdered, six authors become five detectives. But are crime writers naturally good detectives? And are crime writers also the best equipped people to actually get away with murder.
The Northern Territories can be spectacularly beautiful – lush tropical and gorgeous unspoilt coast. But it can also be a harsh place, where tough people make a tough living, where aboriginal and settler communities come into conflict and those small towns so familiar from the many Outback Noir novels that have become bestsellers proliferate.
