...Some of the broad issues that are found in the crime fiction will not surprise anyone who has thought about the nature of Australian culture. If you compare the ways in which different nationalities like their crimes to be resolved -- simply by comparing the popularity of different types of detective -- you come across some interesting and indicative differences. That Americans prefer quasi-independent private eyes and the English prefer quasi-intellectual amateurs won't surprise anyone who understands those national self-concepts, or self-delusions. But it is not the same in Australia. The police procedural, where an honest cop steadily bears down on the problem, whether with American bravura or English banality, seems almost completely without credibility to Australian audiences.

The opposite of that anti-authoritarian response is the remarkable interest shown in Australian crime fiction in hearing the story from the criminal's point of view, a sort of criminal procedural, where a rather dull villain is variously harassed by the police but manages to hold his head up throughout as a kind of evil-doing Everyman -- from early convict sagas to the Wyatt novels by Garry Disher.

A third unique strand running through the material that shouldn't be too surprising is the curious treatment of place. Using the setting as part of the mood, even part of the threat, is a basic from Poe's gothic Paris to Sue Grafton's brightly dangerous California. Australian writers, especially in the past, rarely work in this effective but limited way. They tend to use one of two extremes. In one, the landscape is a major character in the story and is very often the agent of vengeance; in many a traveloguish thriller, the land engulfs the villain by fire, flood, snake or crocodile -- Upfield's stories are often classic cases.

If the setting can have these operatic tendencies, it can also be a complete absence. This may sometimes derive from the editing of London publishers -- J.M.Walsh is supposed to have relocated The White Mask from Australia to nowhere when he moved to England -- but there also seems a curious tendency to write a mystery into an anonymity of place that suggests a real problem of identity -- all the more pervasive because the authors are not well-known, but in their time they were successful enough, like Sidney Courtier, A.E.Martin and Dale Collins and many of the stories in the Australian Journal this century. Not many of the zero-setting writers have the legal reasons that Judah Waten or Ray Mooney had to elude identification of place or people in their exposés of police corruption...

...But if policing, criminals and location all provide -- and it may well be also perpetuate -- not too surprising aspects of the national psyche, there are a number of other features and patterns in Australian crime fiction that are more surprising, less easy to pigeon-hole, and may well need further exploration.

The earliest material deals with convicts, and there is a striking absence here. Familiar as we are with Marcus Clarke's creation of convict anguish in For The Term of His Natural Life, steeped as we are in the dark empathy of Robert Hughes' The Fatal Shore, it is rather surprising to find that the mood and meaning of those novels written when convictism was actually still about have a quite different tone. From Henry Savery's Quintus Servinton (1831) through to John Lang in The Forger's Wife (1855) and even to some extent Caroline Leakey in The Broad Arrow (1859), the convict's experience is shown to be pretty miserable but not in any way anguished. And the tone of the story is to show how convicts coped with their world; it is low style realism.

The convict story as romantic tragedy is a later phenomenon, produced by writers working a full generation after convictism ended: the great example is of course Marcus Clarke himself, quickly imitated by Eliza Winstanley in For Her Natural Life; it was however the noble male convict who dominated, especially after Ned Kelly provided a real example of being honourably game under oppressive constraints. The classic example of the glorified criminal and convict comes in Robbery Under Arms by 'Rolf Boldrewood' who in 1888 created both Captain Starlight, the noble immigrant bushranger, and those youthful, vigorous, dinky-di sporting criminals, the Marston brothers...

...If the reworking of history in increasingly fictional terms is one of the patterns to be seen, another surprise is the presence of sub-genres which do not seem to be found in other cultures. The convict saga, that sub-genre of realism and coping, itself is one of these, but there are other Australian sub-genres which seem quite separate from international forms of crime fiction. The squatter thriller is the name I would give to a story where the crime is involved somehow with a conflict over land -- the murder of the squatter and the attempted marriage of his daughter, as in Ellen Davitt's Force and Fraud of 1865, or a mysterious murder which shakes the social order of the local land-holding classes as in William Howett's Tallengetta of 1857. Charles Rowcroft's two books about the taking of the Tasmanian land are the earliest that could be described in this way, and they characteristically involve the threatening yet also admired presence of Aboriginal warriors, as well as the unnerving presence of escaped convicts and, worst of all, an alliance between the two parties...

...Another unusual sub-genre, and one that we may yet learn more about from research into magazines and newspapers, is the goldfields mystery. Adventures stories involving crimes do come from the Californian Eldorado and the Canadian Klondike, but they are simply adventures of men, animals and the odd woman, in which crime is only a plot device, not the mainspring of the structure. But Australia, alone in my experience, has a clear sub-genre of mining mysteries and, in much more number, short stories that combine the dangers and anxieties of the gold-mining areas with the mystery plot itself.