This intoxicating new ABC crime drama will seriously do your head in

Treasure and Dirt ★★★★

It’s fitting that this captivating outback crime drama begins with the discovery – in an otherworldly tunnel – of a decapitated body. Made with intoxicating precision, Treasure and Dirt is seriously obsessed with doing your head in. Using the detective procedural as a Trojan horse, the show subverts expectations and twists reality, so the fictional opal mining town of Nulla feels like a parallel realm that runs by its own arcane rules.

“We’re a backward, violent, inbred bunch but at least the parking’s free,” notes the town’s police sergeant, Pat Richter (Sarah Peirse). She’s only half-joking. With echoes of both the original Twin Peaks and its 2017 continuation, plus Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake and the foundational outback madness tale Wake in Fright, Matt Cameron’s adaptation of Chris Hammer’s 2021 novel is heavy on menacing absurdity.

It’s a testing destination for Ivan Lucic (Michael Dorman), a homicide detective dispatched from the city. Wound tight and wearing his suit jacket as a reproach to the scorching heat, Ivan has a prickly detachment. His line between bemusement and fury is thin, and at first he doesn’t have much time for his new partner, Nell Buchanan (Liv Hewson). Nell previously worked as a uniformed officer in Nulla and plainly didn’t care for the experience.

As the two feel each other out they’re hindered by the local police and helped by a forensic expert, Carole (Bessie Holland), who listens to “sapphic fairy smut” while she works. Larger-than-life figures circle the askew detectives. The self-declared mayor (Mark Mitchinson) is a hard-nosed hedonist, while the victim, Jonas, was an ex-con no one has a good word for. His one mate, a mountain of a man called “The Giant” (Nathan Jones), is mute.

The effect is, at times, dislocating. Nothing makes sense in Nulla, and the idiosyncrasies mount as Ivan’s past is called into question and Nell debates her path with various voices on her phone. But there’s a crucial through line in how director Madeleine Gottlieb visually marshals the six episodes. She sets bodies against the vast landscape and steadies the camera; it makes you draw breath, then look again.

The director’s artistry extends from nocturnal banter at the town’s burger truck to the mournful sparseness of a desert monument but it’s best expressed through the deep conviction of “The Seer”, also known as David (Thomas M. Wright), the leader of a literally underground Christian sect that Jonas was previously expelled from. As both a suspect and a commentator, David incites Ivan in ways both find uncomfortable.

The performances are full-bodied and very good. Because of the woozy logic and Nulla’s peculiarities the characters have to navigate an interior logic that must be more than mere eccentricity. Dorman has long had a gift for capturing men who can’t quite hide their thorny flaws, while Hewson gives you a palpable sense of how Nell bristles professionally and then personally at the town’s corrupt expectations.

Cameron, who wrote five of the six episodes, steadily adds galvanising roles: there’s not one but two wealthy mining magnates circling, one in old-school iron ore (Kris McQuade), the other a rare-earths tech bro (Eamon Farren). But he also keeps the plot moving and unfurls the mechanics of a good mystery while deepening the themes. Treasure & Dirt is invested in faith, whether in God or a family member, and what that can make you do. That’s what gives this undeniably wild ride genuine underpinnings. The ABC deserves credit for backing such a big, ambitious swing.

Treasure and Dirt premieres at 8.30pm on Sunday, July 19, on the ABC and ABC iview.

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