The River: Chris Hammer, crime writer, returns to the source

Chris Hammer had a singular stroke of fortune when, in 1982, not quite knowing what he wanted to do with his life, he enrolled in a journalism course at a small institution then known as the Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, in the central west of NSW.

The college, which later became Charles Sturt University, retains a near-legendary reputation as a cradle of first-class Australian journalism.

For Hammer, it laid the foundations for what – after he had completed a grand career roving the turbulent world as an SBS TV news documentary maker, and later writing for a magazine and this masthead – led to his current status as one of Australia’s most outstanding crime writers.

Author Chris Hammer at the Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne.Credit: LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

All these decades later, Hammer and I find ourselves enjoying lunch at Port Melbourne’s excellent The Graham Hotel and discussing Hammer’s wild success as an author of “rural noir”, a genre of Australian crime fiction that the legendary political correspondent and connoisseur of mystery novels, Laurie Oakes, once dubbed “dingo noir”.

“It was a very small course,” Hammer recalls of Mitchell, painting something approaching an idyll of youth awakening to life’s promise in an untroubled countryside.

“There were probably only 50 or 60 people a year in the three courses, all combined. There was print journalism, broadcast journalism and public relations, and a theatre course went along with it.

“[Bathurst] is west of the mountains, and in those days, there was no internet. Telephone calls were prohibitively expensive. You’re cut off, and all we had was each other. So we played in bands. And there were plays being produced constantly.

“We did radio shows on the local community radio station, which was based on campus, and still is.

“I’m incredibly fortunate – I made lifelong friends.”

Author Peter Temple, who was Chris Hammer’s writing lecturer in the early 1980s.

Hammer’s greatest fortune, however, was that his lecturer in feature writing was a recent arrival from South Africa named Peter Temple.

Temple would later become Australia’s finest crime writer, turning out the Jack Irish series before winning international fame for the transcendent novels The Broken Shore and Truth.

Back then, however, the unsung Temple was an unforgiving judge of his students.

“He was excoriating,” Hammer says. “He would fail more than 80 per cent of his class, and he would write these terrible comments like ‘get a trade’ or ‘rush to hospital immediately – I suspect brain damage’.”

Nevertheless, Temple’s commitment to style and the authentic voice – he was an exponent of Strunk and White’s classic The Elements of Style (“Omit needless words,” it advises) – left an impression on young Hammer, who grew to enjoy the company of the irascible lecturer.

“Because it was a very small campus, there was really only one bar, which was the student bar,” he says.

“So you’d run into your lecturers at the bar, and at the bar, Peter Temple was the most sociable, funny man with an incredibly dry sense of humour.”

That didn’t save Hammer when he stalked into Temple’s office, demanding an explanation for receiving a mark of 54 per cent for what he thought was a well-written feature story.

“So I went to front him, you know, arrogant little shit that I was, and he just, he just gave me a tongue lashing. ‘Who do you think you are, anyway?’ It was pretty brutal.

“And it was only as I was leaving, walking out the door with my tail between my legs, he said, ‘Oh yeah, by the way, you’re one of four people who passed’, so relatively speaking, I guess it wasn’t so bad.”

There is a poignancy here.

When Hammer’s wildly successful debut novel Scrublands was published in 2018, establishing him as a leading figure in the “rural noir” genre of crime writing, Peter Temple wasn’t around to judge it. He died a couple of months before Scrublands was published.

The novel was adapted for the screen – a co-production between Stan and Nine – and is now in its second season, having shifted from the dry inland to the coast where Hammer set his second book, Silver.

It happens that I have known Hammer for many of his years as a journalist and all of his period as an author.

When I left The Bulletin magazine’s office in Canberra’s press gallery in 2007, he filled the vacancy and became chief political correspondent. When The Bulletin – the oldest current affairs magazine in Australia and the fourth oldest in the world – closed a year later, he joined The Age in the gallery, where we worked together until he became a celebrated author.

We have shared long lunches since the 1990s with a circle of mutual mates from the gallery, several of whom have since become well-known authors themselves, and have taken to the Snowy Mountains for rowdy ski weekends with the same old mates (the “Old Farts”, inevitably) for each of the past 17 years or so.

And so, when we take a table at the venerable, much revived The Graham Hotel in Port Melbourne, there is an easy familiarity.

Author Chris Hammer hoists a glass of red at The Graham Hotel.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui

We know we’re kidding ourselves when we say that we should have only one glass of wine over lunch.

We order a bottle: a TarraWarra Estate pinot noir from the Yarra Valley, agreeing that pinot noir is such an agreeable, relatively light red that it could do no harm to a couple of old hands.

Besides, we are intent on having steaks for lunch. You need a bottle of red at hand for that sort of thing.

We are at the Graham to undertake what might be called literary archaeology, rather than to discuss Hammer’s Scrublands or the six absorbing and best-selling crime novels that have followed it, selling millions worldwide, with another, Legacy, to be published soon.

We are returning to the source; to Hammer’s first book, The River, a non-fiction travel narrative, environmental exploration of the Murray-Darling Basin, and prophecy of climate change, first published in 2010.

The River, Chris Hammer’s first book. Published in 2010, it has been re-published this year.

In 2008, taking his leave from The Age, where he had been reporting on both the environment and national security, Hammer climbed into his little Hyundai station wagon and set off to travel the entire length of the Murray and Darling river systems.

It was almost a decade into the longest and worst big dry in southern Australia’s recorded history, the Millennium Drought.

During his travels, Hammer and his young son hiked for many hours to the almost imperceptible source of the Murray high in the Australian Alps, he drove to far beyond the back of Bourke, crossing the Darling and heading to the Paroo – “the last wild river” because it is not dammed for irrigation – viewed huge irrigation dams and stood flummoxed in South Australia where the exhausted Murray no longer flowed into the sea.

And all along the way, he yarned with Australians whose livelihoods, made increasingly precarious by the drought, relied on the struggling rivers.

The resulting book, The River: A Journey Through the Murray-Darling Basin, received much-deserved critical acclaim, but like most books, it eased into relative obscurity, as did Hammer’s companion book The Coast: A Journey Along Australia’s Eastern Shores, published in 2012.

They may not have been big-selling volumes, but they remain foundational to Hammer’s later great success as an author.

“What I discovered is I actually loved [writing books],” he says.

It was much more than this, however. The landscapes through which he travelled, the people he met, the little towns he visited, and the hardships he observed burned upon the land and its residents by a pitiless climate became the canvas on which he created his later crime fictions.

Through it all, Hammer explained in elegant prose how Australia’s rivers, meandering across a relentlessly flat landscape, behave in a way that is quite unlike other rivers of the world, and how state and federal politicians and water users have manipulated the system in ways that have caused a monumental and lasting environmental mess.

All these years later, MUP has re-published The River, and any half-alert reader can readily recognise the settings for Hammer’s crime fiction.

Scrubland’s fictional Riversend, for instance, is clearly Wakool, a town in the NSW Riverina where the locals insisted Hammer stay in the local CWA headquarters rather than pitch his tent by the bone-dry Wakool River, an anabranch of the equally dry Edward River.

Wakool was clearly happy to have Hammer in town. He was prevailed upon to judge the photographic competition at the annual show.

Our steaks arrive. We have skipped over the Graham’s extensive selection of entrées and various mains and gone straight to the grill.

Fried broccoli, some “green” goodness.Credit: LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

Chris opts for a Gippsland eye fillet, and I’ve chosen a Bass Strait Scotch fillet.

Figuring we should probably have something green, we clear our consciences by ordering a side of fried broccoli in mustard gastrique and crunchy shallots. Delicious, it turns out.

We must, of course, have a bowl of pommes frites. They’re perfectly golden strings touched with spiced salt.

Steak, frites and pinot. We could be in Burgundy. Or heaven.

Chris chooses a red wine jus for his eye fillet. I decline all sauces and take a selection of mustards and horseradish for my scotch fillet.

Here, we agree, is a proper meal for old mates.

The steaks? Grilled to tender perfection.

“I loved the travel, obviously,” says Hammer, taking up the story of his long series of trips through the Murray-Darling.

Steak grilled to perfection at the Graham Hotel.Credit: LUIS ENRIQUE ASCUI

“But what I found I loved was writing, expressing myself at length.

“And you know, The River is – they call it narrative, non-fiction – I’m just telling a story. So, yeah, it’s fact-based, but it’s also impressionistic, so I don’t try and be objective about the places I’m visiting.

“Then I found I like the editing process, and I realised I loved the process of writing books.

“And I had high hopes that this was the launch of something bigger, like a new career.”

Lunch with Chris Hammer at The Graham Hotel

And so it was.

Scrublands, drafted in Hammer’s spare time as he returned to The Age to become online political editor after satisfying his thirst for travelling the inland and the coast, excited a publishers’ auction that earned him a six-figure book deal, freedom from traditional employment and a readership that continues to expand across the world.

He has, at last count, sold 1.2 million books.

We take coffee and drain the bottle. If we weren’t so content, we might have thought to toast the late Peter Temple, who, after all, helped lay the path to this lunch.

• The River: A Journey through the Murray-Darling Basin, by Chris Hammer. Melbourne University Press