Grey clouds are gathering overhead as Chris Hammer parks on the edge of the Jerrabomberra wetlands, a reserve bordering Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin. It will be ironic if it rains – Hammer is here to talk about drought.
In 2008, long before Hammer had begun writing the crime novels that would propel him to national and global fame, he was starting his first book, The River: A Journey through the Murray-Darling. Hammer had been working as a journalist in the parliamentary press gallery, but left to travel the length of the Murray-Darling from its headwaters in Queensland to its mouth in South Australia. It was the height of the millennium drought and Hammer’s resulting travelogue is a moving account of parched landscapes and the people trying to live in them. Fifteen years after the book was released, Melbourne University Press has republished it with a new introduction by Hammer.
