Australia’s ‘quarry noir’ mines our anxiety about our biggest industry
- Written by Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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.
Quarry noir and real concerns
Quarry noir attempts to address real concerns about the social, environmental and political impacts of Australia’s reliance on mining. It connects these issues to the darker aspects of the industry’s history and its uncertain future.
One of the earliest works of quarry noir I found is Lightning Mine (1999) by Kamilaroi man Philip McLaren. Indigenous lawyer Jarra Mariba and American mining surveyor Aaron Shoemaker are drawn into intrigue when a global company locates the “largest iron ore deposit in the world”, on land held by Native Title. The novel also addresses uranium mining and the illegal dumping of waste on Aboriginal lands – a topic also crucial to the denouement of Adrian Hyland’s Gunshot Road (2010).
In Ecstasy Lake (2016), Alistair Sarre attempts to engage with the vexed question of Native Title and First Nations’ rights to mining profits. Geologist Mick Hiskey is bludgeoned to death with his own hammer, not long after discovering a “massive gold deposit” worth a minimum ten billion dollars, on land now held under Native Title law by traditional owners.
As the narrative unspools, it becomes clear that when it comes to the relationship between the mining industry and Native Title law, there is little distance between legality and criminality. As one traditional owner argues: “Native title is just another bullshit whitefella thing. We already own this land based on laws going back thousands of years. Why do we have to negotiate with you, or anyone else?”
In Australia, the land rights movement was sparked in the late 1960s by the Yolngu people’s efforts to protect reserved territory and sacred sites in Arnhem Land from bauxite mining. But with the passing of the Native Title Act, the crown still retained ownership of all subterranean resources. As author Tony Birch notes, the law favours resource companies over traditional owners regarding land access and use.
Ecstasy Lake seems to suggest the possibility of a mining industry built on productive, equal partnerships between well-meaning settlers and Aboriginal communities. However, the ending is ambivalent. A traditional owner reflects, on the possibility of his land being mined, that his community “needs to change. The question is, does it need this kind of change?” The question is not answered. This epitomises the politicised, irreconcilable anxiety of quarry noir.
Alan Carter’s Prime Cut (2010), David Whish-Wilson’s Zero at the Bone (2013) and Peter Papathanasiou’s The Pit (2021) examine the promises and perils of mining booms – particularly the iron ore boom in Western Australia.
Zero at the Bone is set during the 1979 celebration of the state’s 150th anniversary, connecting extraction, colonialism and violence. The Pit addresses – among other sins – iron ore baron Lang Hancock’s record of dispossession and mistreatment of First Nations peoples. “We dig holes in Australia,” muses one character.
It’s what we do. It’s all we’ve ever done, we’re just the world’s quarry, an enormous pit, ever since we struck gold a hundred and fifty years ago.
Prime Cut, set after the 2008 opening of BHP Billiton’s A$2.31 billion Ravensthorpe Nickel mine sparked a minor boom in Hopetoun, a nearby fishing village, considers the social cost of mining on small communities. A foreign worker is the novel’s victim, as Hopetoun begins to resemble “Gotham City”.
It considers the mining industry’s overlap with economic exploitation and racial violence, which began when anti-Chinese fervour on the 19th-century goldfields contributed to the establishment of the Immigration Restriction Act (1901–73).
Prime Cut’s setting is Hopetoun, a fishing village near BHP Billiton’s Ravensthorpe Nickel mine.
Andrea Hayward/AAP
Treasure and Dirt (2021), by the internationally bestselling Chris Hammer (like Harper, a former journalist), starts as extractive fiction and ends as quarry noir. In Finnigans Gap, a loose facsimile of Lightning Ridge, an opal prospector is crucified in his own mine shaft.
The crime is eventually linked to a rare earth minerals mining venture. Australia is positioning itself as a major exporter of these minerals citation, crucial to renewable energy technology. Hammer’s novel suggests the future of mining will look a lot like its violent past.
‘Extractive’ mining crime
Most examples of extractive crime fiction were produced after 2016 and clearly written and marketed as rural crime. They engage with mining in two major ways.
Novels like Blood and Gold (2025) by Michael Trant, Opal by Patricia Wolf (2024) and Fool’s Gold by Fleur McDonald (2018) see the search for gold, opals or diamonds turn violent. The fictional gold town in McDonald’s Fool’s Gold is somewhere “fellas would rather put you in the ground than give up where they’ve found the yellow stuff”.
Mining largely functions as a motive for crimes committed by individuals out of ordinary human greed, desire and jealousy. And these novels are mining an old seam. Writers like Mary Fortune and James Skipp Borlase set Australia’s first crime fiction in the 19th-century gold rush, where “gold fever” turned “mates” against one another, sly grog inflamed tempers, and guns were fired into the air to warn off would-be thieves.
Australia’s first crime fiction was set in the 19th-century gold rush.
Robert Shortried Anderson/State Library of Victoria
Western Australia’s gold capital, Kalgoorlie, is regularly featured in extractive crime fiction, with three novels published in 2025 alone: McDonald’s The Missing and The Prospect, and Lisa Ellery’s Hot Ground. These join earlier efforts by Robert Schofield, author of Heist and Marble Bar.
“In the few weeks since she’d arrived in Kalgoorlie,” McDonald writes of her intrepid investigative journalist Zara in The Prospect, “she’d noticed that people here did what they wanted, when they wanted, regardless of the law. It really was the wild west.”
As this cliché suggests, these works focus on the most salacious aspects of the place, often robbing it of specificity and nuance. Ellery tempers this tendency somewhat in Hot Ground, using her experience as a lawyer in Kalgoorlie to infuse her narrative with geographic and legal detail.
The other major form of extractive crime fiction exploits the mining ghost town as a source of gothic atmosphere and pathos. Margaret Hickey’s Stone Town (2022) and Cutters End (2021) are set in mining towns with “houses with sad facades and secret interiors” and “tragedies in spades”. Cutters End has “the look of a dying dog waiting to be shot”.
United Kingdom-based rural crime writers Cate Quinn and James Delargy have produced novels set in fictional Australian dying or dead mining towns, too. In Delargy’s Vanished (2021), an entire family disappears without a trace from Kallayee, an abandoned WA gold town. They are described as having been terrified by unexplained sights and sounds, including “a rumble like something was stirring in the belly of the earth itself”. Yet, thinks the novel’s rational detective later, “the ground couldn’t just have opened up and swallowed the family”. Illegal underground mining turns out to be the source of the rumbling.
The idea of being “swallowed” by the earth recurs in extractive crime fiction. In The Prospect, Zara worries “the ground could give way and swallow her, at any moment”. In Blood and Gold, passing tourists worry “the vastness […] might swallow them up if they strayed too far off the track”.
This trope of the hungry earth can be traced back to the settler colonial gothic, which emerged in the mid 19th century as a means of grappling with the vast and seemingly terrifying unknowable Australian landscape. But when understood as Country, this land is neither haunted nor alienating.
Mining crime fiction has a chequered record of engagement with colonialism and Indigenous rights. Many novels ignore – or only briefly acknowledge – the topic. However, there is a trend for law enforcement officers of Indigenous background: Trant’s Blood and Gold, Papathanasiou’s The Pit, Carter’s Prime Cut, and Hyland’s Gunshot Road.
These characters are the narrative equivalent of the rote acknowledgement of country mumbled at official events: they serve more to assuage settler guilt than to genuinely advance decolonisation.
Jane Harper’s Last One Out
Harper’s Last One Out teeters between extractive crime fiction and quarry noir. The investigator is a grieving mother, rather than a law enforcement officer; the crime occurred in the past and there is no body. This approach is reminiscent of noir, potentially allowing for more ambiguous, ambivalent engagement with questions of crime, justice and legal authority.
21-year-old Sam Crowley goes missing while writing a university thesis about the impact of the Lentzer coal mine on his hometown of Carralon Ridge. Five years later, his mother Ro is desperate to find out what happened, while the few remaining townspeople turn against each other under the stress of attempting to hold the rapacious mine at bay.
The novel immediately casts the Lentzer coalmine as villainous. From a nearby ridge, Ro surveys “delicate and beautiful” Carralon and the “dark stain” of the Lentzer coalmine that threatens the town. “Monstrous and vast”, the mine “dwarfed the trees and buildings dotted around its perimeter”. The residents of Carralon must contend with houses covered in coal dust, contaminated water, and air full of “grit and sulphur”.
Readers are positioned to believe Lentzer may have had something to do with the novel’s central death, yet the mining company is a shadowy presence. As usual, Harper is primarily occupied with the happenings in the town and lives of its residents, who must decide whether to sell to the mine or continue to live in increasingly untenable conditions.
There are no First Nations characters, nor does Harper engage with Australia as a settler colony. This is common in Harper’s fiction.
The novel seems to suggest the mine’s biggest crime is interrupting settler belonging and futures. Its most important plot points concern owning, selling, occupying and leaving houses, which transcend mere settings to become featured players in the crime narrative. One character runs “a hand gently over the stone of his own home, as if it were an animal caught up in a moment of confusion and distress”.
The novel accords with what Goenpul professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls “white possessive logics”. These often work through “narrative[s] of adversity” that affirm white possession of the land and “effectively disavow Indigenous sovereignty”.
Last One Out does not use the crime plot to indict the industry for broader social, political and environmental failures – as quarry noir typically does. However, the mystery is resolved in a way that recasts settler belonging and futures as inherently violent.
In Last One Out’s final pages, Harper writes, as her protagonist looks down on her town with a new perspective:
It felt to Ro as though the whole place should by rights have spent the last thirty-six hours burning to the ground in a cloud of smoke and ash, or perhaps willingly turning itself over in surrender to the mercy of the mine, begging to be swallowed whole in a fit of self-destruction.
This novel, by Australia’s most popular crime writer, seems at least subconsciously marked by the complex anxiety of quarry noir. And this growing body of crime novels set in mining towns is a major Australian export about another major Australian export: the stuff we dig up out of the ground.
Authors: Meg Brayshaw, John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature, University of Sydney
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