Another month, another grisly death – or two, or three – in some far-flung outback location. In June, a handful of scientists met gruesome ends in The Killings at Parish Station, possibly for cult or alien-related reasons; now, in Treasure & Dirt, one poor fellow in an opal-mining town has lost his noggin. Well, not exactly: his head is right there in his lap.
This beheading triggers, as the press notes put it, “a labyrinthine case with no easy answers”. Which sounds a tad rote – but this six-part series, co-produced by the BBC and superbly directed by Madeleine Gottlieb, is actually a terrific watch, strikingly unlike your average crime drama. Treasure & Dirt brings a grand and surreal cinematic scope rarely seen in television crime dramas, and the writers – Matt Cameron and Kate Mulvany, adapting Chris Hammer’s novel of the same name – redeploy familiar genre elements in unpredictable ways.
Detective Ivan Lucic (Michael Dorman) is not exactly the first gruff, no-nonsense investigator in procedural history. When he arrives in the (fictitious) opal-mining town of Nulla, he’s greeted by the local airport manager with your standard post-flight question: “Are you here for the decapitation?” Lucic is paired with rookie detective Nell Buchanan (Liv Hewson), their first lead being the pursuit of the anonymous person who reported the body. This person is a “ratter” – one of the thieves who, as Buchanan explains, “scurry down your mine at night and steal your opals while you sleep”, which sounds like a hideously ’Strayan reinvention of the tooth fairy.
Local senior sergeant Pat Richter (Sarah Peirse) advocates a form of “self-policing” in Nulla, which has its own peculiar customs and unwritten laws that leave it feeling like another country entirely. It joins a rich vein of off-the-map Australian locations that effectively function as their own realities, à la recent TV shows Deadloch and Population 11 and classic films The Cars That Ate Paris, Welcome to Woop Woop and Wake in Fright.
The mood in Treasure & Dirt is dreamlike, though not in the obvious Twin Peaks-esque way, where unreality is the point. Here it’s subtler, as though there’s something fundamentally wrong with this world; something off that’s impossible to define but present in every scene. Atmospherically it’s very well-judged, with a faded, weather-beaten look – sparse but evocative (props to cinematographer Edward Goldner) – and edited by Tyson Williams in a way that applies rigour and discipline, while allowing individual moments to breathe.
I was intrigued from the start, hooked by the end of the first episode, and pleasantly surprised to discover that the greatest pleasure of Treasure & Dirt lies not in the crime but in learning about the town. The intense thought and care brought to unpacking this location and its weird dynamics results in a setting so vividly rendered that it feels less like something we’re watching than exploring. Locals include opal dealer The Irishman (Dean O’Gorman); the physically imposing “Man Mountain” (Nathan Jones, AKA Rictus Erectus from Mad Max: Fury Road); tech billionaire Robby Inglis (Eamon Farren); and David “The Seer” (Thomas M Wright, conjuring an extremely eerie gravitas), a cult leader who becomes increasingly significant as the story unfolds.
I cannot, in good conscience, neglect to mention the closest figure this godforsaken place has to a ruler – the self-proclaimed “Mayor” played by a gloriously strange Mark Mitchinson. We meet him while he’s marinating in an outdoors spa, sipping on a piña colada in his rainbow-coloured bathers. In another show, the comedic elements would be amplified and the characters’ quirkiness overplayed. But Gottlieb cleverly directs her cast to not just be funny weird but also funny normal: natural in a reality profoundly bent out of shape.
There are a few bumps along the way, such as some occasional slow patches and character dynamics that don’t entirely coalesce, but not enough for me to dock the show any points. The bodies will keep piling up on Australian television but Treasure & Dirt is different. Gottlieb and co understand that the best mysteries aren’t always about who committed the crime, or even the crime itself; sometimes they’re about the place where it happened.
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Treasure & Dirt is airing on ABC TV on Sundays at 8.30pm and can be streamed in full on ABC iView now, with a UK airdate to follow
