It’s hard not to compare Chris Hammer’s Scrublands to Jane Harper’s acclaimed The Dry.
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Both are set in a parched rural community, where rivers have dried up, towns are struggling and people are being murdered.
Both capture your imagination from the first page, full of twists and turns and secrets, full of shocking revelations, full of Australianness in a sense, the drought, the isolation, characters who are cynical, yet open all at once.
In Scrublands journalist Martin Scarsden heads out to Riversend, where a year ago the young local priest calmly opened fire on his congregation and killed five people before being shot dead.
Scarsden, who’s battling demons of his own, is there to write a piece on how the town is faring a year on, but the stories from the locals don’t fit with the accepted version of events and he knows there’s a bigger story somewhere.
Little does he know.
Hammer, himself a former journalist, with stints at SBS’s flagship current affair program Dateline, The Bulletin magazine, and Fairfax, knew there was a story there too.
He spent a scorching summer travelling through the Murray-Darling Basin while researching his non-fiction book The River, which won the 2011 ACT Book of the Year Award and was short-listed for the Walkley Book Awards. He was touched by the people, by the sense of place, by what drew them and kept them, living on the banks of rivers that were dying.
“I had this idea of setting a story in the middle of a drought, surprised that more authors hadn’t used the drought as a background, because it went for so long, it’s still going really,” Hammer says.
“And I wanted this sense of isolation, a confined township, oppressive, that feeling of being trapped.”
He started writing Scrublands in 2012. He had taken a redundancy from The Age in 2008 and freelanced for three years before returning to Fairfax in early 2012. He squeezed writing in around his day job, eventually taking another redundancy in mid-2017. By this time he had the second draft of Scrublands with the publishers. He originally planned it as a trilogy but as his editors wanted a resolution in book one, he reworked the last 40 per cent of the book a couple of times.
Hammer always wanted to write fiction and laughs at the number of journalists he knows who say the same thing. He’s mates with Steve Lewis, co-author of The Marmalade Files and The Mandarin Code, which inspired Secret City, Michael Brissenden (The List) is launching Scrublands in Canberra, Paul Daley and The Guardian’s Katharine Murphy get a mention in the acknowledgments.
“It’s been brilliant being able to make stuff up,” Hammer says.
“When you’re a journalist, and doing non-fiction, you have to be careful of the facts, getting everything right, sometimes stories don’t end how you’d like them to.
“Here characters might start as plot points but then they grow and take on a life of their own, it’s very liberating, people think it's based on some fact, but no, it's just made up.”
He’s also enjoyed having the time to work on a story.
“It was different in the press gallery, with everyone chasing the same story, the same angle for the next day, but when I was with Dateline and The Bulletin I had time to work incrementally towards something that was quite substantial.
“It’s been nice to have that again. I write every day, mainly in the morning, but I’m determined to enjoy it, I won’t let myself get obsessed by it.”
Hammer says he’s now read The Dry and Harper’s second book Force of Nature, which is also set in a rural area. “Both were terrific,” he says.
He also likes Sarah Bailey’s The Dark Lake (Allen & Unwin), another book set in a hot summer in a small town brimming with secrets.
“There does seem to be an appetite for crime stories set outside the big cities,” Hammer says.
“A few years ago if you wrote a crime story, it wasn't set in the country or even the suburbs, it had to be in Darlinghurst or St Kilda or somewhere like that.
“There seems to be an appetite too for that kind of story overseas.”
Scrublands has been sold in to the United States, Britain, France and Russia, and the audio book has been recorded and television rights have been sold, with producers Ian Collie of Easy Tiger and Martha Coleman of
RevLover spearheading the deal to create a major television series.
There’s also a second book, featuring Scarsden and Mandy Blonde, the main female character.
“They both got pasts and a future to explore,” Hammer says. “Martin has a few more stories to tell.”
And it looks like Hammer does too.
Scrublands, by Chris Hammer. Allen & Unwin. $32.99.
