If you have heard the phrase ‘The Back O’ Bourke’ then you’ll have a sense of the isolated places where my crime novel characters live.
My new crime novel has its heart set in Bourke and I bring you a story about a young reporter from the city who lands smack bang in a remote outback town where not much happens. Except a whole lot is happening in this rugged place with bars on its shop windows, a dodgy newspaper editor, what appears to be a corrupt police sergeant and disappearing backpackers that nobody wants to find.
I started this new crime novel back in 2022 and spent an outback road trip in early January listening to an audio version of what I’d written so far, and I LOVE it! I thought I’d share one of the early chapters with you, let me know what you think!
2005
‘We’re not going to make it.’
My eyes darted from the massive black storm cloud hovering less than a metre from the horizon in a straight line, back to Billy. No time to admire his chiselled jaw and the working man’s hands he’d wrapped around me at the Deni Ute Muster a few weeks earlier.
Here we were, driving into the wildest outback storm I’d ever experienced. Actually, the only outback storm I’d experienced. The ute muster was my first taste of the outback life I had chosen after graduating the top of my class from a journalism degree. Although I had dreams of being the next big thing in television reporting, I didn’t have the face, or the body, for it. Working in a suburban Sydney newspaper reporting on the life I’d grown up in held a lot less appeal than a wild west reporter in Bourke, a frontier town with bars on the shop windows and a crime rate assured to keep me busier than Kings Cross on my police rounds.
Billy wasn’t part of the plan but had become part of the adventure when my shitbox car broke down in Deni and was languishing at the wrecker’s who’d paid me $800 when the local mechanic established it was unfixable. Dust billowed behind us as we rattled down an isolated dirt road towards the station Billy was meant to start shearing tomorrow and had roped me in to help. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do but was up for any job they gave me. I’d never seen a real sheep in my life, or stepped foot inside a shearing shed. Sheep sales were going to be part of my new job so if I was going to talk the talk, I’d have to walk the walk.
‘We’re not going to make it,’ I repeated.
Billy ignored me, a slight twitch in his jaw the only sign he’d heard. I wondered if he was panicked too or if he wasn’t bothered by the storm we were driving into. A flash of lightning sliced a cloud ahead of us in half like a hot knife through butter before hitting the ground like an exploding bomb. I felt a twinge in my lower bladder, wondering if I was about to experience the most humiliating moment I had witnessed in primary school when cruel school boys tackled then tickled my best friend until she wet herself.
In the few weeks I’d known Billy he had been unflappable. Me, on the other hand, I was completely flappable. Bridie Brown-Leather, a hyphenated last name complements of my feminist mother who refused to give up her last name when she married my conservative banker Dad. She also thought it made her sound like she was living an exciting life, with hints of city biker vibes.
‘Look, there’s a mailbox. Why don’t we head in there?’
Billy chuckled. ‘Navigation advice from a city girl, that’s a turn-up for the books.’
As the mailbox got closer, with white knuckles Billy made a snap decision and swags, canvas bags and eskies slid suddenly from one side of the Landcruiser ute tray to the other at his sharp turn. I cringed at the thought of my expensive Nikon camera, with the three fancy lenses I’d paid for with my second and third jobs I fitted around study, getting jammed in a corner and smashed by an esky. Billy’s blue heeler cattle dog cross, who had soft floppy black ears and was sleeping at my feet, startled, filling the cab with an odour like no other.
‘Geezuz Lucy, that’s not very ladylike,’ Billy mumbled as we wound down our windows in unison. We were almost under the storm cloud and I could taste the moisture about to burst from it.
Five minutes later we caught our first glimpse of a grand homestead wrapped by a gauzed in verandah on three sides and three, make that four, chimneys protruding from its expansive tin roof space.
Giant rain drops fell like rocks onto our windscreen, leaving red streaks. Billy headed for a cluster of tin sheds of all shapes and sizes at the back of the homestead, seeking out an empty bay.
As we passed the homestead I noticed it wasn’t as grand as it had looked in the distance, and as the black cloud hovered right above and shut out the light, a shiver danced across my shoulders.
‘Haunted,’ I whispered. ‘I wonder if anyone lives here.’
A deafening rumble of thunder chased down less than a second later by a crack of lightning that could power the whole of Sydney illuminated a woman on the verandah, peering out at the unexpected visitors.
The lightning raised my voice a few octaves. ‘Thank goodness for that, I hope they’re friendly. Of course they’ll be friendly, we’re in the outback. Everyone’s friendly. Apart from Bradley Murdoch that is. Then again, he was friendly. But in a serial killer kind of way.’
‘Bloody hell Bridie, you can talk.”
I snapped my mouth shut. I could talk, a lot, especially when I was in panic mode.
Just as the heavens opened and dumped its entire contents on us, Billy expertly inched his way into a narrow space between a rusted open topped tractor with a bird’s nest on its seat that looked like it hadn’t moved for half a century, and a beat up holden sunbird, faded yellow with four flat tyres.
With eyes wide, I spun around to look out the rear window to watch sheets of water wash the dust and dirt away, the homestead completely invisible except in those seconds when lightning followed the roaring thunder. The rain on the tin shed roof was deafening as Billy and I huddled in the cab, the odour of Lucy lingering even though Billy had banished her to the back soon after we arrived.
‘We made it,’ I whispered.
Just.