Year Released: 2018 (2013, 2016, 2020)
Directed by: Rachel Perkins (Ian Sen, Warwick Thompson, Wayne Blair)
Starring: Aaron Pedersen, Judy Davis, Tasma Walton, Madeleine Madden, Tasia Zalar
(TV-MA, 6 episodes, approx.. 50 minutes each)
Genre: “Western, Outback Noir, Mystery and Suspense

“I came to piss people off.” –Jay Swan

An abandoned vehicle with no gas and doors askew like some wounded white Ibis failing to take flight. One and then two young men missing. Secret loves and liaisons, crimes buried and unearthed. The Australian Outback comes alive in all its glory, violence, and pain.

Modern “Aboriginal” Jay Swan is a defiant detective. He is alternately mute, brusque, sympathetic, and fiercely independent. Making him the living contradiction of the terrain he patrols – stark, untamed beauty at war with the facade of civilization.

Maybe that is one reason he is an outsider to both his own people and the mostly white law enforcement officials he must work with. The “blackfellas,” as they call themselves, think him a coconut – brown on the outside, white on the inside – while the local police are less than enthusiastic, especially since he is sent in from afar to solve their problematic cases. He is, as such, an intruder to their terrain.

These themes are explored in two full length films and two series. The films are Mystery Road (2013), and Goldstone (2016), with two 6-episode series in 2018 and 2020. [Series 3 and a forthcoming series 4 are prequels with another lead playing a younger Swan.]

While the original feature length film is good, it is filled with more shootouts than character development and is inferior to both series starring Aaron Pedersen as Jay Swan. The better of the two, Series 1, starts out slow enough with the disappearance of two young farmhands on an outback cattle station. One is a local “indigenous” – the more politically correct and possibly more accurate term for Aboriginals – “footy” (football) hero and the other a white backpacker.

Before we go on, we should clarify these local terms. “Footy” or Australian football is closer to Rugby or if you really want to get confused:

In Australia, “football” may refer to any of several popular codes. These include Australian Football, rugby league, rugby union, and association football. As is the case in the United States and Canada, association football has traditionally been referred to in Australia as soccer.

And then we have the “backpacker”, which to Americans usually means someone hiking, but not so in the Land Down Under. In Australia a “backpacker” generally refers to young people on a working holiday who carry their possessions in a rucksack or similar. They travel around, enjoy the country, work to pay for their living costs, and then go home.

Not to mention that “uncle” and cousin or “cuz” don’t really mean that either but are just general terms of respect and endearment for fellow “blackfellas.” Except when they actually do mean blood relations, which tends to muddy up the waters a bit, too.

And speaking of blood and water, we have plenty of each, starting out with the cattle water stations where the two young guys were last seen, and the blood on the roadside somewhere near where their yute (what we would call a pickup) is left abandoned with the motor running and doors ajar. That part about the motor left running is one of the many great deductions Jay makes, which sets the case and the local police sergeant on their heels.

And here is the gem that makes Series 1 great – the tension between Jay and that local police sergeant Emma James (Judy Davis). They both have important secrets they refuse to reveal to each other, and they are defensive and accusatory about it.

Jay’s is his failure to acknowledge that he has a child, which tells us so much about him. Crystal (Madeleine Madden) is quite lovely, but she has the worst qualities of both her estranged parents – impulsive and rebellious like Jay and tending toward addition like her semi alcoholic mother Mary (Tasma Walton).

Sergeant Emma James also fails to disclose some blood relations until she has to, and hers is perhaps the more egregious omission.

Like Dirty Harry and Hinterland’s Thomas Mathias, not to mention Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle from The French Connection, Jay is driven. Solving a case is his addition, and like his fellow driven detectives, there is little room for domestic bliss.

•••

Now a word about the indigenous people in Mystery Road as well as Indian reservations in Wind River and Longmire. In all cases we see the alcoholism, addiction, and poverty as well as racial tensions, anger, and resolution to escape those chains. It seems to Different Drummer that it is not so much racism as it is the clash of two cultures at odds with each other. The native cultures lived a life in tune with the land, the invading more “civilized” cultures did not. Forced from the land into unnatural living conditions, they cannot thrive. And the often “civilized” overlords are often the opposite of that label, violent and brutal.

In Mystery Road we see their postage stamp yards, caged off by ugly chain link fences. A repeated scene is someone holding a hose trying to green up a lawn that is completely unnatural to them as well as the outback as a whole, and as fruitless as their current lives seem to be.

Mystery Road in all its installments does not preach, it merely reveals the facade of civilization for what it is.

Not to miss. You won’t be disappointed.

–Kathy Borich
🥁 🥁 🥁 🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

This Aussie favorite fits the time of year right here in the good old US of A, as well, where our zucchini plants (vegetable marrows for our Brit friends) tend to overwhelm us.

Simple, easy, and not expensive. Even Mary or Crystal, Jay’s estranged wife and daughter, might turn their hands to it.

And not the cliched Bloomin’ Onions or other “on the Barbie” staples we expect from the Land Down Under.

Bog in, mates.