Chris Hammer: ‘The suburbs can be delightfully sinister. The blandness is a great setting for crime books'
Grey clouds are gathering overhead as Chris Hammer parks on the edge of the Jerrabomberra wetlands, a reserve bordering Canberra's Lake Burley Griffin. It will be ironic if it rains – Hammer is here to talk about drought.
In 2008, long before Hammer had begun writing the crime novels that would propel him to national and global fame, he was starting his first book, The River: A Journey through the Murray-Darling. Hammer had been working as a journalist in the parliamentary press gallery, but left to travel the length of the Murray-Darling from its headwaters in Queensland to its mouth in South Australia. It was the height of the millennium drought and Hammer's resulting travelogue is a moving account of parched landscapes and the people trying to live in them. Fifteen years after the book was released, Melbourne University Press has republished it with a new introduction by Hammer.
As we set off on one of the tracks that weave through this tapestry of marshes, woodland and grassland, Hammer admits he hadn't reread The River until he was presented with the opportunity to republish it. 'There were bits I was going, 'Oh, that's a bit overwrought',' he says, laughing at himself. 'Then there were other bits, I thought, 'That's quite good. Did I do that?''
Nearly two decades after his journey, more has changed than Hammer's writing. He has left journalism behind and become one of Australia's most celebrated crime writers, producing a string of novels that have shot to the top of bestseller lists around the world. Scrublands, his first, has now been adapted into a major TV series.
The Murray-Darling has changed, too. In the new introduction, he reflects on how many of the dams he described as dustbowls are now overflowing, how rivers that were dry are now full. 'Australia has greened once more,' he writes. 'Complacency has returned.'
But when asked how to counter today's complacency, he dials down that damning statement. 'Some people are deeply concerned that the climate is becoming more volatile,' says Hammer, who speaks with a quiet authority in measured, thoughtful sentences. 'It's not just a gradual increase in heat, it's maybe deeper and more severe droughts and certainly bigger and more frequent floods. But then you'll talk to other farmers and they'll be quite insouciant, saying, 'We've always had cycles of drought and flood.''
The Murray-Darling Basin is so enormous – roughly the size of France and Germany combined – and home to such diverse communities who work the land in such varied ways, that it is also difficult for Hammer to make any overarching conclusions about how it has changed since his journey.
Hammer doesn't expect the Murray-Darling to be a priority for the re-elected Labor government. 'It's not in crisis at the moment, so there are plenty of other things to spend money on,' he says as we loop back on ourselves, crossing over a creek into some woodland. However, if there was desire in the Labor party to introduce new laws, now would be the time.
The stories in The River have fed into Hammer's blockbuster crime fiction. In person, Hammer is confident and composed, but as a writer he describes himself as a 'pantser' who develops his characters and storylines as he writes – flying by the seat of his pants rather than plotting in advance. As we walk off the paved trail on to a dirt track that skirts Jerrabomberra Pool, where six cormorants are lined up on a branch, Hammer explains that he always decides on one thing before he starts writing.
'I always start with the setting,' he says. 'It has to be right there at the beginning. It's the stage that the characters will populate, where the plots will play out. It's critical to the way I write.'
Several of the rural towns featured in The River have inspired locations in his novels: Wakool inspired the fictional town of Riversend in Scrublands and The Tilt is set in the Barmah-Millewa forest. Hammer's next novel, Legacy, will be published in October. 'It's set on a reimagined Paroo River,' he reveals. 'It has no dams and no irrigation and was in the best ecological condition when I travelled during that drought.'
While Hammer's locations are inspired by real places, he makes sure they're never carbon copies – although people long for them to be. 'It's intriguing. I have readers who say, 'I know that place. I grew up there. You've captured it so well,'' he says. Most of his readers, however, are not so familiar with bush towns; approximately 90% of Australians now live in cities. 'I think it's an escape for them. It gets them away from their daily commutes,' he says.
Hammer personally feels connected to the bush. He grew up in Canberra in the 1960s and 70s, one of three children of a public servant father and schoolteacher mother. Much of the capital was still being developed at the time, so as a teenager Hammer was desperate to leave – and briefly did, going to university in Bathurst and getting a job in Sydney, although professional opportunities soon brought him back. He met his wife in Canberra in the early 1990s, and they have made it home for their son and daughter.
'It was a pretty boring place as a kid, but what it did have was nature,' he says. 'We'd walk in the bush a lot and go to the rivers to swim.' Today, he still finds peace in the city's parks. If he's struggling to unravel a knot in one of his plots, he goes walking in the Red Hill nature reserve rather than staring at his screen. This might suggest a somewhat dreamy approach to writing, but in general Hammer is more regimented than romantic. His work as a journalist has trained him to churn out words and hit deadlines, and he is not sentimental about deleting and rewriting entire chapters if he develops better ideas.
The current popularity of books set in rural areas has led to cries that Australian writers are overlooking the rest of the country. When Christos Tsiolkas was interviewed for this column, he said writers were 'guilty of turning away from the suburbs'.
'I think there's some truth in that,' says Hammer. 'But the suburbs can be delightfully sinister – the anonymity and blandness of the suburbs is a great setting for crime books. I'm sure I'll write one at some point.'
As if to prove his point, we break out of the treeline back on to the road where we're parked. One hundred metres away are rows of forgettable brick cottages, but immediately before us stands a building that looks institutional – it could have been part of a school or hospital. It is clearly abandoned, although artists have tried to prettify it with a brightly coloured mural. A quick Google search brings up rumours that it was a morgue, but a deeper dive disproves that. Still, there's something unsettling about it – it's almost like something out of Hammer's novels.
'Look,' he says, cracking a smile and pointing past the graffitied back wall. 'There's even a raven sitting on the fence.'
The River by Chris Hammer (Melbourne University Press, RRP $36.99) is available now
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