Books · Screenplays · Film
Outback crime.
On the page and on the screen.
One story, three ways in: a gripping outback crime novel, the feature screenplay it came from, and a book about how that screenplay was made.
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The Novel
The Dust-Up at Broken Hill
An Outback Crime Novel
Some legacies aren’t meant to be escaped. They’re meant to be confronted.
Broken Hill is a hard country. Forged by drought, isolation and hardship, it’s a place where everyone knows everyone — or thinks they do.
When a series of brutal murders tears through the outback, Detective Sergeant Rusty Gunn finds himself confronting more than a homicide investigation. Descended from William Gunn — a Depression-era bank robber whose actions left a stain on the family name — Rusty has spent his life trying to outrun a legacy of violence and loss. With young Indigenous officer Bindi Goolagong, he hunts the killers before they vanish into the vast Australian interior.
Then two American drifters, Mike and Bob, roll into town. One is reckless, charming and incapable of staying out of trouble. The other is older, smarter and far more dangerous than he appears — and together they may hold the key to a mystery that stretches far beyond Broken Hill.
A gripping blend of crime, dark humour, family legacy and outback noir about guilt, redemption and the debts that refuse to die.
Coming soon to Amazon
The Screenplay
A neo-western for the screen
Before it was a novel, The Dust-Up at Broken Hill was a feature film script. It opens with a bank robbery and a police shootout in 1930s outback New South Wales, then moves eighty years forward to the robber’s grandson — a half-deaf policeman working the same unforgiving country.
- Format
- Original feature screenplay
- Genre
- Neo-western · crime · dark comedy
- Setting
- Broken Hill and Parkes, NSW
- Registered
- Australian Writers’ Guild, No. 10309
- Read it
- Published in full in Screenwriting: The Art of Influence
Film, television, streaming and audio rights are available. Producers, directors and agents are welcome to get in touch.
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The Screenwriting Book
Screenwriting: The Art of Influence
What Tarantino Teaches Us About Story, Structure and Originality
What do you actually take from a filmmaker you admire — and what do you owe the material in front of you?
Screenwriting: The Art of Influence is a study of cinematic influence written from the inside. It brings together two works submitted as a doctoral thesis at the University of Sydney: a critical exegesis, and the full feature-length screenplay of The Dust-Up at Broken Hill.
Part One takes Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill apart not as objects of homage but as machinery: nonlinear structure built around moral accountability, dialogue that conducts philosophy without announcing it, violence that carries a cost, and music chosen for argument rather than mood. Part Two is the screenplay itself.
For screenwriters, film students and anyone who has wondered how influence becomes originality — the theory, the practice and an honest account of the distance between them, in one volume.
Available now on Amazon
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