Lay of the Scrublands
Scrublands head writer Felicity Packard previews the return of the Australian mystery series with sequel Scrublands: Silver, explaining how she adapted Chris Hammer’s novels and how she avoids cheating the audience.
A four-hour drive south of Perth, Augusta sits on the edge of Australia. Located at the southwestern tip of the country, the fishing town is home to approximately 1,000 people living on the banks of the picturesque Hardy Inlet.
In recent months, that number has swelled with the arrival of the cast and crew of Scrublands, after the town hosted the production of the drama’s second season.
“I will never be as famous again as I am in Augusta right now, because everyone has watched Scrublands,” series head writer Felicity Packard tells DQ as the production prepares to take over the local pub for a day and night of filming, five weeks into a seven-week shoot. “We have had an extremely warm welcome.
“Some towns in Australia get shot in a lot, and this is the first time anyone’s shot anything in Augusta. So not only are they quite excited to have us, but it also means the pictures are all very fresh. We haven’t seen these vistas before, which is fantastic. The lighthouse on Cape Leeuwin features in our show and it’s where the great Southern Ocean meets the Indian Ocean. It is literally the corner of Australia.”
The location will certainly ensure Scrublands: Silver, as the sequel is titled, will stand apart from its predecessor, which had a rural backdrop thanks to its setting in locations around Melbourne, Victoria.
Commissioned by streamer Stan and Nine Network, Scrublands debuted in November 2023. The first season told the story of investigative journalist Martin Scarsden (Luke Arnold), who arrives in Riversend and begins to look into the killing of five people by young priest Byron Swift (Jay Ryan) one year earlier.
Scrublands: Silver takes place 18 months later, with Arnold and Bella Heathcote reprising their roles as Martin and Mandy Bond. The couple have moved to Martin’s coastal hometown, Port Silver, after their relationship was sparked by a kiss at the end of Scrublands. But when Martin’s childhood friend Jasper is brutally murdered and Mandy becomes the prime suspect, Martin must search for the real killer while also confronting secrets about Port Silver and his long-buried past.
Produced by Easy Tiger (Colin From Accounts, The Twelve) in association with Third Act Stories and distributed by Sphere Abacus, both seasons are based on novels by Chris Hammer.
“I really loved the chance to come back and find out more about Mandy and Martin,” Packard says of returning to the show. “I loved season one – I thought it was a tremendous show and we did great stuff – but both of them, particularly Martin, were very busy with the plot. This time around, even though there’s lots of plots for him to uncover and mysteries to solve, he gets a chance to figure out how his past has affected who he is, and that’s really great.
“Martin and Mandy kiss once. Now they’re living together, and that’s really fun. But he hasn’t been forthcoming about a whole lot of elements of his past. So how does Mandy cope with that? The other thing I was really looking forward to doing was actually trying to lean into what it like to have been Mandy, when you’ve had your face plastered across the media after she slept with the priest [in Scrublands]. How do you recover from that? And then what happens when you get thrown into another catastrophe? So it’s very much about the media and what it’s like to be under trial by media. That was interesting to me.”
That Martin is a reporter also gives the series a different approach to investigating the central mystery, as “his superpower is his journalism rather than a gun,” Packard adds. “I liked that it gave him a different outlook; he’s not a cop and he also doesn’t have the right to go to lots of places that cops and lawyers do. So he has to be clever and he has to use his smarts. I was really attracted to that. He has to navigate between using people and misleading them, and also trying to get to the truth. I like that tension.”
The writer’s previous credits include true crime drama Underbelly, World War Two series Anzac Girls, Netflix drama Pine Gap and horror film spin-off Wolf Creek. Writing Scrublands, she says, is a combination of all those things. “Every show has its own challenge, but every show comes back down to principles of interesting characters doing interesting things that look good,” she notes. “It’s a very simple, very complex formula.”
That formula also involves a certain approach to adapting Hammer’s source material, as Packard believes writers should “change what you need to change, but don’t change just to be different. It has to be better or more suited to the medium.”
She continues: “Both Scrublands and Silver as novels have just got a lot more material than we could possibly do justice to in a four-hour series. What I tend to do is figure out what are the bits that are going to work best for us on TV and then figure out what we need to do to support those choices. Sometimes we don’t need as many characters or we need different characters to do different things. Silver’s a big book so there are lots of things in it that we didn’t include, but I really feel like people who’ve read the book will feel like they are watching an adaptation of that book.”
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Adapting Scrublands was made particularly challenging by the fact that, although they are the lead characters, Martin and Byron occupy wholly separate timelines, as Martin investigates what Byron did in the past. That meant Packard had to avoid “great big exposition dumps” while also ensuring everything that happens still feels “real and natural.”
Similarly, on Silver, “there’s a lot of plot and you’re trying to not make it a plot-fest,” she says. “You’ve got to leave room for character moments. One of the things we do in Scrublands and in this one is there aren’t subplots; there aren’t B stories. Every story that seems like a B story is actually a cleverly disguised element of the A story, and that is also why it works for four hours.”
As the head writer, Packard worked alongside Kelsey Munro and Jock Serong for Scrublands, with Serong and Fiona Kelly writing on Silver. In both cases, they spent a long time talking about the books, what they would retain and which characters they needed.
“We spent a lot of time breaking the book down, and then trying to pull it back together in plotting and plotting, then going away and writing and then realising we’ve got it wrong,” she says. “We worked drafts and drafts, and then it gets to a point where the writers finish their commitment to the show and I take over. I just write across all the episodes, with complete impunity. I have to at that stage; I just write what I need to across all the episodes.”
Notably, it took Packard some time to settle on the wider theme of the story in Silver – coming to terms with one’s past – and that led to rewrites to better infuse that idea through the four episodes.
“It took me a long time to find the truth of what we were saying, and I feel like we have,” she says. “All of Chris Hammer’s books are about a historical crime, at some level, and how it affects the now. For Martin, that was more about redemption. He had done this thing in his past where one of his contacts had been killed, so he felt he was washed up as a journalist. And this story [in Scrublands] gave him redemption.”
But whatever the story, when it comes to a mystery drama like Scrublands or Silver, “you can’t cheat the audience,” Packard says. “And there have to be clues that you’re dropping throughout as to what the solution to the mystery is, the whodunnit or, in Byron’s case, the whydunnit. You can’t cheat it, so that’s a real challenge to plot all of that and to balance it. I quite enjoy that dance of trying to figure it out and strike that right kind of narrative, the setting up and paying off.”
Scrublands has proven to be a hit around the world, with international buyers including the BBC, RTÉ in Ireland and Sundance Now in the US already picking up Silver. When the sequel debuts, Packard hopes it will exceed expectations among viewers at home and abroad.
“I think season two is really strong. Luke Arnold and Bella Heathcote are doing some of the best work of their careers, and they’re just finding layers, depth, humour and compassion that you don’t normally see,” she says. “And I do think our beautiful location is really interesting.
“Overseas viewers tend to associate Australian beaches with the Gold Coast or Summer Bay from Home & Away. This is not a beach like that. It’s beautiful, but Australia has an enormous coastline and not a lot of it looks like Bondi Beach. But hopefully they love the story and they come back to see what’s happened to Martin and Mandy and to barrack for them.”
tagged in: Easy Tiger, Felicity Packard, Nine Network, Scrublands, Scrublands: Silver, Sphere Abacus, Stan