Outback noir

Belanglo State Forest is two hours north of my home in Canberra – barely a drive by Aussie standards, just a quick detour off the Hume Highway on the way up to Sydney. You can find it online by name or by typing “Murder Forest” into your browser. It was here, amid the tidy rows of plantation pines, that the serial killer Ivan Milat dumped the bodies of his seven confirmed victims (there are believed to be more) – backpackers he had picked up while long-haul truck-driving in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Milat was an old Australian nightmare made flesh. For more than two centuries Aussie storytellers – white storytellers – have been spinning tales of the ravenous, dark-hearted bush, of innocents lost and a “savage” landscape in need of taming (a settler/colonial manifesto trussed up as folklore). Milat’s arrest in 1994 gave that narrative a mugshot and ushered in a new era of terror nullius. Gone were the dreamy, lace-clad schoolgirls of Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975; adapted from Joan Lindsay’s novel of 1967); in their place were the guileless tourists of Wolf Creek (2005). And gore. Lots of gore. A high-octane, high-ocker horror show.

Three decades after his arrest, Milat has become an outback noir cliché: the caged monster. The convicted killer died in prison in 2019, but he haunts the pages of airport novels and true-crime podcasts. He is also the subject – in fictionalized form – of Fiona McFarlane’s new book, Highway Thirteen, a collection of interlinked short stories. This subject might seem quite the pivot for the Sydney-born author, whose previous novel, The Sun Walks Down (2023), was a lush nineteenth-century epic about life in a colonial outpost. But there is a unifying preoccupation: that obdurate fable of the big, bad bush, swallower of children.

In The Sun Walks Down McFarlane confronted the old trope head on: she sent a young boy out into the scrub for six days and nights, and imagined who might choose – or be forced (or forbidden) – to search for him. In her new stories she is more oblique. Reading Highway Thirteen is the literary equivalent of watching an eclipse: one must trace the shadow to see the spectacle. (For another sideways take on Milat, see Emily O’Grady’s novel The Yellow House, 2018, in which a young girl uncovers her grandfather’s ghastly legacy.)

The name of McFarlane’s killer is Paul Biga, and we will see him just once in this book – as a teenager – and only through the reminiscences of a former neighbour. The boy she recalls is ordinary, insofar as any teenager can be called ordinary: “each of them is strange”, she explains, “and bewildered, and in mourning, because they’re all in exile from their childhoods, just as they always longed to be”.

There has been an ethical shift in crime writing over the past few years – particularly in nonfiction and screenwriting. It’s a move that has taken us away from tales that turn serial killers into blood-speckled rock stars and towards something more humane: stories that honour the lives of victims, rather than gawk at their ruined bodies (see Hallie Rubenhold’s book about the victims of Jack the Ripper, The Five, 2019, or ITV’s series about the Yorkshire Ripper, The Long Shadow, 2023). The questions these new works ask are thorny, necessary and societally rich: questions about investigative presumptions, political myopias and collective complicity. They are cultural whodunnits.

Highway Thirteen is a welcome literary addition to this subgenre. Biga is never the focus or engine of McFarlane’s twelve stories. The author is not interested in explaining her killer – there is no armchair profiling, no catalytic origin story. Instead she is interested in what he set in motion in Belanglo: the anguish, the regret, the prurient curiosity, the guilt by association, the victim-blaming, the pop-cultural fizz. So we begin in that forest, with a super-fan intent on visiting the scene of the crime: “I know everything there is to know about the murders. I’ve read all the books”.

From Belanglo (Barrow in the book), McFarlane traces Biga’s shadow across the country and beyond; and backwards and forwards in time. We meet an actor playing the part of the ageing killer; a political candidate who shares his tainted surname; and a married couple who have turned their encounter with one of Biga’s victims into a dinner-party anecdote (“There are so few opportunities to get close to the largeness of life, its terror and mystery, while remaining perfectly safe”). Perhaps the most brilliantly discomfiting story follows a lone hitchhiker. The young woman can still feel her boyfriend’s hands around her throat. And so she walks along the edge of the road as bait, testing her grim suspicions, waiting for a familiar car.

We meet the usual suspects too – cops, victims, grief-weighted parents, Biga’s disgraced family – but all of them in savvy and unexpected ways. And often through another person’s eyes. Highway Thirteen is a masterclass in reflection and refraction. Fiona McFarlane is interested in what we choose to see and what we choose to ignore. It is easy to conjure up devils, demons and monsters – to spin blood-soaked tales of the murder forest. Far harder, she shows, is to face our own, “ordinary” backyard cruelties.

Beejay Silcox is an Australian writer and critic

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