Black Snow might be the Australian history lesson you never knew you needed

Black Snow

Stan from January 1
★★★½

Black Snow must surely count as one of the braver exercises in Australian TV in recent years. A crime drama set in the Australian South Sea Islander community of North Queensland, it demands a cast the like of which we haven’t seen before – and that means a cast that has had little, if any, professional experience.

It could have been a disaster, but it isn’t. It’s a real breath of fresh air.

Travis Fimmel brings his own swagger and mystery to the story as a cold-case detective with demons of his own.Credit: Lisa Tomasetti/Stan

The spine of this six-parter is a cold-case investigation that takes Brisbane-based detective James Cormack (Travis Fimmel) up north. As he probes the mysterious murder of 17-year-old Isabel Baker (Talijah Blackman-Corowa) on the night of her high-school formal in 1994, he begins to tug at the tapestry of secrets and lies that holds the town of Ashford together. It’s not so much a case of who has something to hide, as who doesn’t.

It’s a well-constructed genre piece, but it’s also pretty familiar. Where it really gets interesting is in the way series creator Lucas Taylor and his writing team have interwoven aspects of the area’s shameful history into the narrative – specifically, the trade in Pacific Islanders who were brought to Australia from the mid 19th century to work in the cane fields. It was called blackbirding, it was in large part a form of slavery, and more than 60,000 people were brought here that way.

The echoes of that dark history reverberate through this tale; the statues of early colonialists that stand in silhouette against a sky dominated by refinery smokestacks are no longer enough to make a terrible past seem respectable.

It’s not of quite the same standard, but the show it most reminds me of in this respect is HBO’s Sharp Objects.

But Black Snow also gives us a palpable sense of the Islander community as a unique and complex part of Australia, one that many outside it likely know little about. It’s up to the cast of first-timers to bring it to life, and a few wobbles aside, they do so brilliantly.

Leading the charge are Blackman-Corowa, whose affectless delivery is strangely winning, and Jemmason Power, who plays the grown-up version of Isabel’s younger sister, Hazel. She’s initially hostile to Cormack’s investigation, before becoming his greatest asset. Unless, that is, she has something of her own to hide.

As for Cormack, he’s got his demons too. We first meet him paying someone to beat him up in an alley outside a pub. Clearly, he’s not just your average copper, and Fimmel – best known for his Ragnar Lothbrok in Vikings – makes him bristle with volatile ambiguity, righteously dedicated one minute, on the brink of implosion the next.

The support cast, including Alexander England (left) and Rob Carlton (right), is excellent.Credit: Lisa Tomasetti/Stan

The supporting cast is terrific too. Brooke Satchwell never fails to impress, though she doesn’t have quite enough to work with here. Alexander England has perfected the promising-lad-gone-to-seed vibe, while Rob Carlton and Kim Gyngell – as a farmer and local copper respectively – nail that menacing sense that country hospitality might turn to hostility in a flash.

Black Snow is a Trojan horse of a show. It’s an effective crime drama that does pretty much all you could ask of it. But lurking inside there’s a whole legion of more challenging ideas.

Stan is owned by Nine, publisher of this masthead.

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