The fourth stop in a series of literary excursions sees an author on the trail of a cold case in his hometown…

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THE OPPORTUNITY TO speak about my crime novels in the libraries of the New South Wales New England region has very special meaning to me. I was born at Inverell and became an enthusiastic book borrower at the town library as a child, hunting out the inspiration that opened up new worlds to a farm kid. It was there that I started to find my feet as a storyteller.

Since Tank Water was released by Adelaide’s MidnightSun Publishing in 2021, I’ve been regularly asked whether I set that book and its sequel Dirt Trap (2025) in any of the places I lived as a child in the 1970s: Myall Creek, Delungra, and Inverell.

The truth is complicated, since I never set out to write crime fiction, let alone create a region with a violent past like the fictitious towns in my novels. 

Despite my immediate family moving to the Blue Mountains when I was nine, the landscape of my childhood – the fertile upland valleys between Delungra and Bingara – never left me.

After living in Sydney, the United Kingdom and Brisbane for many years, I moved back to the New England in 2017. Accepting that the relocation would put a big dent in opportunities to work as a journalist, my plan was to co-build my partner’s home-based jewellery business while I rewrote an existing novel manuscript. That story was my years-long attempt to explore the conflicts within a rural family who had LGBTIQ+ members and worked the same black soil as mine had, but it was missing an overarching theme that linked the past with the present. 

In that year, the state of NSW was still coming to terms with its epidemic of hate crimes against the LGBTIQ+ community. The NSW Police had been pressured into conducting internal case reviews, but there was a push for an independent inquiry into historical cold cases.

My journalistic interest was piqued the day I took a look at the interactive online map of those cases published by SBS. As I scrolled through the sorry history of under-investigated deaths, the locator suddenly moved north from Sydney. Very few of these men had died in rural regions, but there, staring back at me, was a suspicious death that had taken place in the district where half my family had lived and worked since the 19th century: Inverell, my hometown.

That was the tragic death of 33-year-old Russell Payne, whose body was found in his unit in February 1989, the broken end of a television antenna in his urethra. The report that underpinned the SBS map was written by Rick Feneley, and it pieced together the little that was known about Russell’s case. Criminologist Steve Tomsen and researcher Sue Thompson suggested there was a “less compelling” case for him being the victim of a gay-hate crime, but his death revealed hallmarks that may have pointed to hatred and/or bias. Another critical detail was that no coronial notes for Russell could be retrieved by the NSW Police.

The weight of mystery began to plague me as I walked daily through the scrub near our home at Deepwater. I felt the responsibility of being an ‘Inverell boy’ who now lived close enough to the scene to do some footwork, because I suspected that the tyranny of distance had allowed the death of another possibly gay son of my hometown to languish without further investigation. 

And that just wasn’t good enough.

Not for the Faint-hearted

That same week, I realised I could position historical gay-hate crimes in the fictitious country town of my manuscript, and have them investigated by a character closer to the present day. It felt like a big leap to impose a risky new theme to my years of work, but as far as I could tell, this subject had rarely been attempted in fiction, if ever.

The inspiration was so strong that I completed a new version of the novel within months, words leaping off the ends of my fingers at the keyboard as each stage of my research was completed. This was not Russell Payne’s story – I was determined for the sake of surviving families to avoid portraying any real-life case – but an original, fictional mystery.

To help fund my writing, I picked up a part-time regional arts job, and once the manuscript was completed, I took another risk. Anna Solding of MidnightSun Publishing was a guest editor at a manuscript pitching event run by New England Writers’ Centre in September 2018. Despite the whole event sounding as challenging as speed dating, I booked my 10-minute session. Afterwards, I was very hopeful when Anna asked me to send her the manuscript.

A month later, I gave a paper at a queer-themed Newcastle University conference. Having long abandoned academia, I’d taken yet another risk and agreed to present my growing body of research on the rural gay experience. There was a chance that the collective presentations would be published.

A month after that, my partner and I took a huge risk by opening a creative business – The Makers Shed – on the high street.

Its growing success through most of 2019 bought me time to submit my manuscript to every agent and publisher I could get it to. As the months stretched out, I waited and wondered if all my writing efforts would pay off. Meanwhile, the longest and harshest drought in living memory parched the New England.

I got a strong bite from one agent, who gave helpful feedback but dropped my manuscript after claiming that the Rural Noir sub-genre was over. Soon after, I submitted the novel to a publisher I’d met a few years prior, when she’d considered publishing my earlier memoir. She made very positive noises while spending two hours with me on the phone, but ultimately that interest turned out to be another mirage. My dreams of being published seemed to evaporate into the dust that blew daily through our property.

One random afternoon between bushfires, a call came from Anna Solding of MidnightSun thirteen long months since we’d met at that pitching session, asking whether my manuscript was still available because she wanted to publish it.

I nearly fell off my chair.

While I waited for a contract, the New England burned through the hell of Black Summer.

Not long after I signed it, the rains came, at last.

Then Covid hit.

Tank Water had been scheduled for release a year hence, and I sensed that I’d eventually be doing a lot of public speaking about gay-hate crimes. So, with time on my hands I set out to fact check Russell Payne’s case, hoping to meet his family, if indeed they’d ever lived locally.

Sniffing around your hometown after what could be an unsolved mystery might sound like a jaunt in a Christie novel, but it’s not for the faint-hearted. If it turned out that Russell Payne had been murdered, his killer had never been brought to justice. My gut told me to tread very carefully, because this was going to be the biggest risk of all.

First stop was Inverell Library, soon after the first pandemic lockdown ended in 2020, to look at the archive of The Inverell Times for a report on Russell’s death. There was no missing the word ‘Murder’ splashed across the front page a few days after his body was found. I hunted for more, but the masthead never appeared to publish any further coverage and the story just disappeared from the town’s collective memory.

So librarian Sonya Wilkins guided me to the Inverell District Family History Group, based at the library. Within minutes, the volunteers had sourced Russell’s place of death and the site of his burial at Inverell Cemetery.

I raced around there in the car, spotting my own family plot in the distance as I hunted for Russell, only to be confronted by a completely bare grave. All that marked the place was grass, and that felt incredibly wrong in a country town that supposedly cared for its own.

But I pushed on, going through the long application process for coronial notes on his death via the Inverell Court House. While I waited, I interviewed the landlord of the property where Russell had lived and died, gleaning a sense of the enduring mystery that hit the town so suddenly in early 1989.

I also contacted Sue Thompson and Steve Tomsen, who’d worked for many years on the list of suspected historical gay-hate crimes. They generously shared the information they’d collated, but I’ll never forget Sue’s exhortation, “Please don’t give up on Russell.”

The NSW Police eventually produced the death-scene paperwork, because a state parliamentary inquiry into historical gay-hate crimes was in the wind. These documents made for grisly reading. Russell’s had very likely been a painful and lonely death, and investigating police in the late Eighties had made their disdain for the victim’s lifestyle clear, using archaic and judgemental terms instead of treating Russell with dignity. 

Journalistically, I had a strong story in my hands, so I started to pitch it to news editors. Russell’s name was on the long list of suspected cold cases set for the judicial inquiry; but from the country’s biggest mastheads to its newest rural publications, not one newsmaker was even remotely interested.

Tank Water was released on October 1, 2021, and my world changed.

Rural Noir was most certainly not over, it was simply diversifying. Suddenly invited to literary events, particularly for crime writing panels, I was grateful to have the facts of the historical gay-hate crime wave at my fingertips, especially the rural cases. The high-profile Scott Johnson case was in the news cycle, giving audiences and readers a handle on the whole issue.

But a much bigger wave was rising in the form of the The NSW Special Commission of inquiry into LGBTIQ+ Hate Crimes (1970-2010), which started calling for submissions in late 2021.

It was time to find Russell Payne’s family, and a receipt from the records of the local funeral director identified them. I was determined because the most important aspect of Russell’s inclusion on the list of possible gay-hate cold cases was to find out if anything was known about his sexual orientation. Evidence collected by the police at the scene of his death that may have shed light on that issue was missing; but his loved ones might have known.

Death Knock

Having given up on journalism after moving away from the city, I was bowled over by a call from Gabrielle Chan, editor of the new Guardian Australia Rural Network. The brief of this desk was to publish rural news by journos living in the bush, and when I pitched a bunch of stories to Gabi, the one she picked was Russell Payne’s.

When it was published in November 2021, I hoped his family might be alerted. Meanwhile, that story landed this Inverell boy a job as an editor and reporter for Guardian Australia.

It was a big 12 months for getting work about historical hate crimes in front of even bigger audiences. Aspects of bias in the coronial notes about Russell’s case proved very useful in my 2022 essay published internationally in The Journal of Australian Studies, Backwards to Bourke: Bulldust about Gays in the Bush, which sprang from that earlier conference paper and pushed back against centuries of rural homophobia.

But the search continued for Russell’s family. I eventually stumbled on his sister under her married name in a local online newsletter in another town altogether, and sent a message via the local post office, asking if she’d like to meet to chat about her brother.

When the call came, I realised in a rush that I’d instigated an old-school death knock, although instead of taking place in the days or weeks after a death, it was 33 years since this family had received the unexpected news of Russell’s untimely demise.

It was a great privilege to sit with his relatives one sunny winter morning in 2022 and go through the records. They courageously broached the critical point: that Russell had come out to his former brother-in-law just weeks before his death. They also spoke about the pain and confusion of never having follow-up from police despite their many unanswered questions. The reason for Russell’s bare grave is not my story to tell, but I came to understand.

By the time The NSW Special Commission of inquiry into LGBTIQ+ Hate Crimes (1970-2010) began lengthy hearings in 2023, all this footwork had resulted in a far more thorough and understanding picture of Russell Payne than had ever been captured since his death. 

To inform the commissioner Justice John Sackar, a forensic pathologist took another look at post mortem documents for Russell. However, like the vast majority of the 88 names on the list of cold cases, his death was not recommended for further investigation. 

Yet in his final report, Sackar stated that the language in the 1989 coronial notes for Russell, “might be characterised as prurient or contemptuous in relation to diverse sexual practices … It may be that one of the reasons Mr Payne did not seek medical assistance was because he was embarrassed or concerned about a hostile or humiliating experience if he did so.”

Still, thanks to local records and volunteers at a well-resourced library, and the memories of his family, Inverell had been pivotal in providing an accurate and dignified picture of one of our own.

Which is the reason that I never mind if people assume my novels are set there. What I hope to have captured in fiction is the way rural families and many in the community are willing to dig deep for the sake of their LGBTIQ+ loved ones, and there is a greater emotional truth in that.

Michael Burge, Brydie O’Shea and Narelle Fernance in conversation with Sonya Wilkins at Inverell Library on Wednesday May 13, from 2.30pm. Contact the library on (02) 6728 8130.