Cosy Crime Fiction, Australian Regions and Climate Crisis: Reading Sue Williams’s Rusty Bore Series in the Victorian Mallee

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Abstract

Australian crime fiction engaged with regional and rural places, communities and histories is flourishing. The most prominent face of this is “rural noir”, but the “cosy crime” genre has also made a mark in Australian rural crime fiction. These subgenres are often positioned at different ends of the crime spectrum, with cosy crime commonly positioned as a “lighter”, domestically oriented alternative to the hard-boiled nature of rural noir. As a result, cosy crime is not credited with the same critical power as its rural noir bedfellow. This article argues that the Australian cosy crime novel deserves consideration as a subgenre entirely capable of engagement with social critique which, in an Australian context, tend to focus on settler colonial and environmental crimes. The article explores this through a discussion of the Rusty Bore Mysteries series of cosy crime novels by Melbourne-based author Sue Williams and set largely in the Victorian Mallee region, in the tiny fictional town of Rusty Bore. We argue that these four novels exemplify the critical capacities of Australian cosy crime fiction, in particular its attention to what has been termed “eco-crime”, alongside a commentary on the economic and social impacts of global capitalism on local communities. Drawing on our conversations about Williams’s novels with Mallee-based book groups, we further consider the role of genre fiction in this regional reading community, especially genre fiction’s capacity to generate discussion around colonial violence and climate crisis in rural Australia, topics that can often otherwise be avoided or actively denied.

Author Biographies

  • Emily Potter, Deakin University

    Emily Potter is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She researches across the fields of Australian literary studies, the environmental humanities, and place-making studies, with a particular focus on regional places and communities, as well as creative and participatory research methodologies. She is the author of Writing Belonging at the Millennium: Notes from the Field on Settler–Colonial Place (2019), and the lead CI of the ARC-funded project, “Understanding place-based repair in climate-affected communities”. 

  • Brigid Magner, RMIT University

    Brigid Magner was born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and now lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She is Associate Professor in Literary Studies at RMIT University and co-director of the non/fictionLab. Her monograph, Locating Australian Literary Memory, was published by Anthem Press in 2019. She is chief investigator on the ARC-funded project, “Reading in the Mallee: The Literary Past and Future of an Australian Region”.

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Published

2025-05-09

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Articles

How to Cite

Cosy Crime Fiction, Australian Regions and Climate Crisis: Reading Sue Williams’s Rusty Bore Series in the Victorian Mallee. (2025). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 24(2). https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/JASAL/article/view/20980