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https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-australias-quarry-noir-mines-our-anxiety-about-our-biggest-industry-239523>
"A geologist is bludgeoned to death with his own hammer. An opal prospector is
murdered, his body found crucified down a mine shaft. An entire family
disappears, apparently dragged down into the mined-out spaces below an
abandoned gold rush town. These are just some of the crimes in a growing body
of contemporary Australian crime fiction that combines the nation’s most
profitable industry, mining, and its most profitable literary genre, crime.
2025 was a boom year, with eight Australian novels in the genre – including
Last One Out, by Jane Harper, whose first novel,
The Dry (2016),
kickstarted a global craze for so-called rural crime, or “outback noir”.
I found almost 40 mining crime novels published in a roughly 25-year period
(1999–2025), set in every state except Lutruwita (Tasmania). They cover all of
Australia’s major modes of mineral extraction, from alluvial gold mining to
open-cut iron ore and coal. In these novels, the spaces, economics and politics
of mining in Australia provide the crime plot’s requisite victims, red
herrings, suspects, perpetrators and twists.
Most of these books are adult fiction that takes place in or near the present.
But there are historical mining crime novels, too. Some, like Robert Engwerda’s
Mosquito Creek (2010) and Ben Hobson’s
The Death of John Lacey (2022)
feature murder and mayhem on the 19th-century Victorian goldfields. There is
also mining crime for young adults, like Martin Chatterton’s
Scorpion Falls
(2022) and Graeme Akhurst’s acclaimed Indigenous gothic horror,
Borderland
(2023)."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
