Introduction
Sunshine Noir delivers social realism rather than the stylized realism of US noir. Grit is embedded under the fingernails, not merely sprinkled around the scene as an aesthetic choice. Sunshine Noir takes place in the outback under an unblinking sun, rather than the slick and mean streets of the dark city. The noise and fury of the urban centre is replaced by a great silence.
(Click on PDF icon, upper right, if you prefer to read this as black print on a white background)
Sunshine Noir is concerned with a double loss: the attempted eradication of Indigenous culture, and/or the destruction of working class communities under neo-liberalism. Australian noir narratives critique modernity through the eyes of two groups left behind. Indigenous Australians, historically not merely left 
behind, but nearly wiped out by the colonial project. In the present day, often separated from language, land, and even family. Working class and poor Australia, historically as expendable bodies for the English; contemporarily as causalities of neo-liberalism and class bigotry. Living economically fragile lives in marginalised communities, both in terms of infrastructure (roads, schools, and so forth), and geographically, pushed further and further to the periphery of the major cities, out of sight and mind of middle-class Australia.
Sunshine Noir, as the title suggests, very much deals with the environment. There is a fear and foreboding in the land that simply does not exist – or at least, certainly not to the same extent – in other global noir. In reviewing Australian Western noir, The Proposition, Roger Ebert makes the following observation:
“There is the sense [in Australian films] that spaces there are too empty to admit human content. There are times in “The Proposition” when you think the characters might abandon their human concerns and simply flee from the land itself.”
In Australian noir the land is almost always presented as a hostile, barren, and pitiless place: in its vastness, a great silence.
The exception here is when the protagonist is Indigenous, as with Jay Swan (played by Aaron Pederson), a cop returning to his land in the neo-noir Goldstone; or Blackie, a recently-released criminal also returning to his land in Paul Collis’ novel, Dancing Home. Within these characters exists a connectedness, a communion, with the land. For them, the existential horror comes not from the land, but a knowledge of what the land once was: a horror at what has been lost.
A Great Silence
Australian Noir shares many characteristics with the classic US form. It is unremittingly bleak, the protagonist is almost always in a state of alienation, the narrative deals with corruption and power – be it state, corporation, or criminal enterprise (and the intermingling of these three), and it very much 
critiques modernity. What distinguishes Australian Noir – or Sunshine Noir, as I have termed it – are three aspects: its social realism; its focus on class, and the depiction of the natural environment. For this article, I will discuss the most pronounced element of these three: the environment.
Sue Matheson, in her essay The West Hardboiled, argues:
“In the hardboiled tradition, the connection between characters and milieu is extremely important because the states of the inner world, the mind and emotions, are transmitted by expressionist techniques of exaggerated or distorted representations of the outer world. Thus, in film noir, claustrophobic rooms, labyrinthine alleyways, and dripping dank cities act as metaphors that reflect the psychological conditions of their protagonists.”
Imogen Sara Smith, in her essay, In Lonely Places: Film Noir Outside the City states:
“[US cinema] found a sculpted beauty in the stark, arid landscape of the American Southwest, a hard country fiercely loved by its settlers for its pure air, space and freedom. Film noir [on the other hand] offered something closer to Eliot’s ‘The wasteland’, which uses a sterile, poisoned country to symbolize spiritual emptiness,” and, “away from law and authorities all power resides in violence and the willingness to use it.”
These arguments are both made by American scholars discussing US films noir. There are no comparable texts on Australian noir that I could find, certainly that specifically pertain to the environment. While these statements are true, Sunshine Noir goes beyond anything depicted in US noir in terms in the hostility of the environment and the psychological breakdown of the characters trapped by it.
The extreme nature of the Australian landscape reflects the internal desolation of the protagonist. This is 
epitomised by the bleak Western Noir, The Proposition. The film opens with Englishman Captain Stanley (played by Ray Winston) looking out at the imposing landscape. He says: “I will civilise this land.” Set in the remote Australian outback in the 1880s, it is a line he is to repeat again, with increasing desperation as the narrative progresses, and one (deliberately, one assumes) reminiscent of the ‘mission civilisatrice’ (or civilising mission) of colonial expansion. We discover that the land itself is not in need of civilising, but the foreigners who dwell on it. Whether the barbarous criminals; the captain’s fellow police, who are violent to a man; or the townspeople, insular, suspicious, and thirsting for the blood of the criminals. Those who fear the land become poisoned by that fear, or perhaps more accurately: the land strips bare the truth of their natures, exposing the worst in each of them. As Stanley also says: “Australia. What fresh hell is this?”
Yet, paradoxically, those who embrace the land become worse. The life of Captain Stanley, desperately trying to hold on to his concept of civilisation with a neat garden, white picket fence, and eggs for breakfast cooked by his wife, is juxtaposed with the man who ‘goes wild’: Arthur Burns. Arthur is the head of the gang Stanley is hunting and the most violent of all of them. He now lives in the outback, feared by even the local Indigenous people, who call him ‘dog man’.
The dogman knows poetry, recites it, speaks movingly of life and love. He is transfixed by the wide brown land, staring out at it, a look of revelation on his face. The great silence, calming the psychopath within. The land is a metaphor for his character. His brutality and remorselessness, but also, its terrible beauty.
Arthur says to another gang member, as he watches the sunset:
“You can never get your fill of nature, Samuel. To be surrounded by it is to be stilled. It salves the heart. The mountains, the trees, the endless plains. The moon, the myriad of stars. Every man can be made quiet and complete. Even the lowliest misanthrope or the wretchedest sinners.”
And Jellon Lamb, a bigoted, anti-Irish bounty hunter played be the late and great John Hurt, says of Arthur:
“Oh, he sits up there in those melancholy hills; some say he sleeps in caves like a beast, slumbers deep like the Kraken. The blacks say that he is a spirit. The troopers will never catch him. Common force is meaningless, Mr. Murphy, as he squats up there on his impregnable perch.”
The Proposition puts forward the argument that this man, this remorseless killer is the land.
The relationship with the land is inverted in Indigenous noir. The alienation, for the Indigenous character, comes from the built environment imposed on the landscape (in Dancing Home), or from the exploitation of the land by mining companies (In Goldstone). Indeed, for Goldstone, the mining company is a constant impediment to Indigenous association with the land, to the extent that it has even corrupted the local land council, paying off all the elders.
In Dancing Home, Blackie looks out his car window at the passing landscape:
“No ceremonial earth dances take place at the top of the mountain now. The old dancers left that place of dreaming when the white people came through with gun, cutlass, and the Bible… Forgotten by many, that beautiful place now cries alone all night long for her dancers to come back and step softly, to sing to the old mother earth. She waits there, scarred and bleeding – waiting to be admired again by her children, waiting once again to be the centre of the world.
A pine forest, planted on the side of the road. All the trees shiver when the wind blows. The pines cry too. They sob like stolen children did when the boss came for them – them pines. They tremble when the chainsaw begins to rip through their brother’s trunks, they shiver and tremble each time they hear a truck coming, thinking it might be coming to take them.”
These exceptions aside, the environment oppresses. In The Rover, for example, written and directed by David Michôd, 
depicts a bleak Australia, near future. It is a Mad Max-ian wasteland, where the land itself is reclaiming the continent, subsuming what is left of the built environment. Almost every scene is in the stark sunlight, the characters looking for respite from its harshness. The protagonist Eric (played by Guy Pearce, who having starred in L.A. Confidential, Memento, The Proposition, and Animal Kingdom, must be Australia’s most important noir actor), like the environment, is spare in his words, desolate in his outlook, and merciless in his actions.
Or in Peter Temple’s seminal noir novel The Broken Shore (Temple coined the horrific name ‘kanga-noir’ for the Australian version. We shall only forgive him this atrocity for writing a noir novel so good it won the Miles Franklin). In this, a key plot point for both the protagonist and the mystery he is trying to solve is ‘The Kettle’. The surging, violent sea of a point of land at the heart of the broken shore. It is here the 
protagonist’s father committed suicide (it is a known suicide spot), and an Indigenous boy is thrown to make it look like suicide. Here, where one submits to the raw power of the Australian environment, is where one dies. The Kettle is described as follows:
“…the huge sea, the grey-green water skeined with foam, sliding, falling, surging, full of little peaks and breaks, hollows and rolls, the sense of unimaginable power beneath the surface, terrible forces that could lift you up and suck you down and spin you.”
Here, in the earlier reference to the criminal as the Kraken, and consistently in the way it is depicted on screen and on page throughout Sunshine Noir, the land is leviathan. By leviathan I mean a creature of vast and unimaginable power. A creature barely aware of the individuals that dwell upon it, fleas on the back of the beast. When the leviathan sleeps there is a great silence, pressing down on those without the ears to hear the language of the land and sea. When roused, the leviathan – through heat, through flood, through the crushing ocean depths, through its arid eternal plains – destroys the good and the wicked alike.
Conclusion
Sunshine noir bathes a corrupt world in its bright shining light. The light does not purify, but rather picks out, unflinchingly, every detail, every flaw, every ugliness. Noir that hides in the shadows can afford to be aesthetically pleasing. It can be stylish, even attractive.
In Sunshine Noir the only beauty is in the land. And it is a terrible, despairing beauty. The land is the leviathan: omnipresent, indifferent, cruel, and inescapable. The great silence of the Australian outback, of the sun-flattened empty streets of the suburbs, is the silence of the Australian soul. The desolation of the marginalised, an existential emptiness coming from a loss of identity and place, or from the loneliness of standing against a corrupt system, or from an unjust world that has long left them behind.
