RONNI SALT Gunnawah. Reviewed by Karen Chisholm

Ronni Salt’s debut is historical crime fiction at its best, with a strong sense of place and time and wonderful characters at its core.

Ronni Salt will be well-known to denizens of what was Twitter, now X, and followers of independent media. A pseudonym that has been in use for many years, Salt’s identity might be a well-kept secret, but her first novel, Gunnawah, clearly comes from a position of either lived experience or extremely good research. Everything about this novel, from the people to the place, and the evocation of the 1970s, is, from this reviewer’s personal experience, absolutely spot-on.

Rural Australia in the 1970s was a place of considerable flux. Many, mostly younger people, were chafing at the bit, desperate to get out from under towns and farms where the physical horizons were wide and expansive, unlike the societal ones. Back in those days, conformity was key to survival, the unspoken rules always being don’t rock the boat or expect too much, and keep the dissatisfaction, loneliness, and trauma to yourself, just as many generations before you have done. And do it within a small group of people who know everything about everybody. Or so they think.

Outside the Gunnawah Bakery the main street hummed with the early morning bustle of a country town of 989 people still looking to recruit the other eleven.

The shire mayor has announced he is going to get those 11 people before the end of 1974, but that announcement came at the New Year’s Eve shindig at the lawn bowls club, and everybody knows better than to believe anything said at those events. Gunnawah comes across as a typical Australian small town servicing a vast farming area that is just hanging on. Check out the bakery, the pub, the café owned by a Greek couple, the local newspaper, the farm supply business owned by the local mayor, and you’ve done the tour of the town’s highlights.

If you scratch a bit deeper, though, Gunnawah and places like it are quietly and relentlessly changing. Not everyone notices, but those who do see the ownership of farms moving quietly from families to faceless corporations, to owners from somewhere else. Perhaps it is a form of selective blindness – new infrastructure leading to new owners surely means new opportunities for everyone. There are enough people peddling hope where there has been the whiff of stagnation to distract any questions or concerns.

Adelaide looked up, engrossed in the bird. After a few moments she turned. ‘I think this is the last farm. You know, I reckon this used to be the Hendersons’ farm. But these are new owners now, from further up north, I think.’

Of the people central to this novel, Adelaide Hoffman is key. A member of one of the area’s original farming families, there’s something going on with Adelaide and her immediate family that makes them fragile and traumatised. What keeps her in the district is the job she lands with the local paper run by widow Valdene Bullark:

… working class girl made good, former Kings Cross tenant and now sole owner of the town’s Gunnawah Gazette – [Valdene] managed to keep her life and her business together. But only just.

Valdene is the widow of Colin – they bought the business back in 1942, and built something strong, until Colin tragically died in a hit and run accident. There’s a history of women in this town arriving and finding themselves in charge after the sudden death of husbands – the same thing happened to Oksana Babich when her husband Viktor died, leaving her in charge of the Victoria Hotel.

Alongside Valdene is the quiet figure of Wayne Trevaskis, former shearer, bar fly, and old friend. Wayne keeps a low profile, the depth of his long-term friendship with Valdene only coming to light as Adelaide starts to see the reasons why these people came here years ago.

The grouping of Adelaide, Valdene, Wayne and Valdene’s dog Elvis is one of the most engaging investigative crews that’s seen the light in Australian crime fiction in recent years. Funny, fierce and wise, Valdene and Wayne have led Lives (capital L intended) hinted at throughout the novel (Kings Cross identities and all). As a foil for the naive but determined Adelaide, they form a central threesome with a faithful companion that readers should thoroughly enjoy spending time with.

Meanwhile there are big plans afoot for an irrigation scheme that will transform farming in the region.

‘We could attract dairy farming here or beef cattle. All sorts of things.’

The problem is what they are attracting is very different, as Valdene explains to Adelaide one night at the pub.

Valdene breathed in, cautious, watchful. ‘The mafia, love. They call themselves ‘Ndrangheta. They’re the Calabrian version of the mafia. They’re the ones we’ve got around here.’

Salt isn’t afraid to throw in some real-life references as she builds a story of the extent of the marijuana growing that’s been quietly building in the region, a business that will blossom once the irrigation scheme solves the perennial problem of an inconsistent water supply. Names like Al Grassby and Gough and Margaret Whitlam from the political spectrum (the irrigation scheme side of things) and Donald Mackay, a well-known anti-drugs campaigner who vanished in very suspicious circumstances (the more sinister side), give the story a sense of place and time for those of us who remember them all.

The novel works by slowly and steadily building a sense of lots of things that aren’t quite right. An odd farm visit during an irrigation scheme publicity tour sends Adelaide and her beloved dog on a night-time search-and-nearly-get-destroyed mission, to some niggles starting to scratch people’s minds. The anti-drugs crusade of the local mayor’s wife seems to flush some unexpected people out, before a frightening and very nearly tragic attack on Adelaide’s family home. Questionable cops in the next big town are up against the locals – one, older, not so much corrupt as lazy, and a new boy on the block who notices stuff. As does Adelaide – a long-term resident but young, she’s growing up in a hurry and the connections she’s finding are answering a lot of questions she didn’t even know she had. What she also never realised is how many people know about the personal trauma she is trying to deal with, and who and what has hurt her badly. All of this comes to a head when local federal member Michael Di Rossi disappears late one night – blood is found near his car, but there is no sign of him, dead or alive. There are a lot of questions about Di Rossi as well, including his family background, and the power and influence he wields as an up and coming politician.

The solutions to most (but not, to be fair, all) of the threads in this intriguing tale come from the connections that people who know everyone can make. There’s also a bit of good old-fashioned investigative journalism with a hefty dose of nosiness. But mostly everyone gets it together and starts to look in the right directions based on a lot of things – odd feelings, vaguely remembered events, and inconsistencies. Lots of inconsistencies going back a long way in a lot of local lives, and some questions that needed to be asked out loud. All of this swirls quietly in the background until Adelaide, Valdene, Wayne and Elvis the dog stick their noses into farm sheds and an old house. Then a body shows up in Saddleback Lagoon and everything that was meandering along like the Murray River itself, slow, steady, deep and a bit murky, spreads out, thinning and becoming transparent.

Ronni Salt Gunnawah Hachette 2025 PB 336pp $32.99

Karen Chisholm blogs from austcrimefiction.org, where she posts book reviews as well as author biographies.

You can preorder Gunnawah from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW. It will be published on 1 January 2025.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: 1970s, Al Grassby, Australian crime fiction, Australian women writers, Donald Mackay, farming towns, historical crime fiction, irrigation, Murray River, Ronni | Salt, rural Australia