The River: Chris Hammer, crime writer, returns to the source

Sydney Morning Herald

22-07-2025

Chris Hammer had a singular stroke of fortune when, in 1982, not quite knowing what he wanted to do with his life, he enrolled in a journalism course at a small institution then known as the Mitchell College of Advanced Education in Bathurst, in the central west of NSW.
The college, which later became Charles Sturt University, retains a near-legendary reputation as a cradle of first-class Australian journalism.
For Hammer, it laid the foundations for what – after he had completed a grand career roving the turbulent world as an SBS TV news documentary maker, and later writing for a magazine and this masthead – led to his current status as one of Australia's most outstanding crime writers.
All these decades later, Hammer and I find ourselves enjoying lunch at Port Melbourne's excellent The Graham Hotel and discussing Hammer's wild success as an author of 'rural noir', a genre of Australian crime fiction that the legendary political correspondent and connoisseur of mystery novels, Laurie Oakes, once dubbed 'dingo noir'.
'It was a very small course,' Hammer recalls of Mitchell, painting something approaching an idyll of youth awakening to life's promise in an untroubled countryside.
'There were probably only 50 or 60 people a year in the three courses, all combined. There was print journalism, broadcast journalism and public relations, and a theatre course went along with it.
'[Bathurst] is west of the mountains, and in those days, there was no internet. Telephone calls were prohibitively expensive. You're cut off, and all we had was each other. So we played in bands. And there were plays being produced constantly.
'We did radio shows on the local community radio station, which was based on campus, and still is.
'I'm incredibly fortunate – I made lifelong friends.'