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Based on former journalist Chris Hammer\u2019s debut novel, the four-part crime mystery Scrublands<\/i> sits squarely in the genre of Australian rural noir. With its vast landscapes and tightly enclosed interiors, it conjures a palpable sense of both the vast space and the social claustrophobia of life in a small country town where everyone knows \u2013 or thinks they know \u2013 everything about you.<\/p>\n
This being a mystery, everything is not really known at all, either by the locals of Riversend or by the viewers (unless they\u2019ve read the book, of course, and many people have). Lifting the lid on the secrets that led Catholic priest Father Byron Swift (Jay Ryan) to kill five parishioners before being fatally shot by local cop Robbie Haus-Jones (Adam Zwar) becomes the job of an outsider.<\/p>\n
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Jay Ryan stars as the gun-toting Father Byron Swift in Scrublands.<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Stan<\/cite><\/p>\n Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold, who played Michael Hutchence in INXS: Never Tear Us Apart<\/i>) is the blow-in. He\u2019s an investigative journalist with The<\/em> Sydney Morning Herald<\/i> who\u2019s suffering PTSD after losing a friend on assignment, and he\u2019s been sent to the town to do a puff piece a year after the tragedy, as a way of easing back into things.<\/p>\n But you can\u2019t keep a good snoop down, even when he\u2019s feeling low, and before long Scarsden has become convinced there\u2019s a lot more to the story than the tale of a paedophile priest going rogue after being outed.<\/p>\n By turns he\u2019s encouraged and frustrated in his efforts by Mandy Bond (Bella Heathcote), a single mum and owner of the only bookstore in town. She knows there\u2019s another explanation \u2013 after all, the dead priest did so much good he can\u2019t have been all bad \u2013 but there are some trees she\u2019d rather Scarsden, with whom there is clearly a mutual attraction, doesn\u2019t go barking up.<\/p>\n Investigative journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold) and police constable Robbie Haus-Jones (Adam Zwar) in Scrublands.\u00a0<\/span>Credit: <\/span>Stan<\/cite><\/p>\n Written by Felicity Packard and directed by Greg McLean (screen veterans both, the pair last collaborated on the Wolf Creek<\/i> series for Stan), Scrublands<\/i> shimmers with a kind of golden glow. It doesn\u2019t feel quite as oppressively hot and parched as The Dry<\/i>, perhaps, but it does create the sense of a town that could go up in flames at any moment, as much from its internal tensions as any external factors.<\/p>\n Produced by Easy Tiger, which presumably hopes to find in Hammer\u2019s books (there are three Scarsden novels to date) a franchise to rival its Jack Irish<\/em> series, the show was shot in and around Maldon and Castlemaine in the goldfields region of Victoria (the book was set in the Riverina district of NSW). The town and landscapes are characters as much as the supporting cast, which includes Robert Taylor as the local patriarch and Alison Whyte as Mandy\u2019s dying mother.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n