The Crawlers of Mr Inbetween

The Australian underclass and the wolf grin of the swagman

Crawler. The old convict word for a convict.

— Richard Flanagan, Question 7

SPOILERS

Mr Inbetween is Australia’s very best show. Locally it’s in a league of its own, and globally amongst the best. Spasming between the everyday delights and terrors of fathering an eight-year-old daughter and the darkness of a criminal underworld spotted with Tarantino-esque asides and homages, it’s funny, violent, and surprisingly moving.

It’s also deeply Australian. Perhaps no more so than in its reflexive love of the convict and its suspicion of the wealthy.

Mr Inbetween is set in Australia’s working class underbelly in Sydney’s west. Its protagonists live on the outskirts of the city just as they lurk on the outskirts of society, darting in and out past the Blue Mountains that mark the perimeter of suburban Sydney life.

The show loves its poor and downtrodden. Scratch a ruffian and you get a misunderstood boy misled by the winds of fate. When our anti-hero Ray Shoesmith is sent to kill a pair of useless junkie assassins, he chats one up: a Perth lad who used to play in a band. Ray befriends Dave, a bloke who kidnaps and gets pretty close to killing Ray. Ray doesn’t retaliate when he gets the upper hand. Ray gets Dave. He gets what Dave’s up to. Dave needs the cash. His missus is preggas. He had a job and made a decent go of it — it wasn’t personal. No one gets it more than Ray. What choice does a bloke have in this world? The strong survive and the weak get killed. In prison Ray meets a nice guy who crossed the wrong ex wife and unfairly found himself in prison. This is a land of wolves and he is no wolf. Fearful and decent, soon enough he finds himself a smear against a prison wall.

In this world mateship runs deep. An ancient Australian mateship of the crawler variety, of diggers, of swagmen, the shepherd boys up to no good, alone out in the bush, watching the sheep for the squatters and the landed graziers. Not just Gaz, Ray’s pee-tape loving mate who has Ray’s back. But take Dirk, a former veteran and comrade-in-arms, who Ray sets up with a job. Even after Dirk robs his new employer (also Ray’s employer), Ray intervenes to protect him, to set him up anew far away, before Dirk jumps onto the rocks of Sydney’s harbour. Mateship is good but it’s not enough in Mr Inbetween’s dark and desperate world. When Ray leans over a bloke who tried to have one over him, bleeding out after a gunfight, Ray tells him not to worry about it. The guy’s not worried about himself. My boys, he says. Got ‘em killed. His mates. He let his mates down. There’s no greater tragedy than that in Mr Inbetween’s Aussie mythos.

You see, the down-and-outer in Mr Inbetween may be a crook, he may be a crawler, he may be an addict or a killer, but he’s probably a decent bloke beset on all sides by evil. When Ray ultimately retires and hangs up his scythe, he returns to innocence, the most working class station of all: the humble cabbie.

The greatest villains of the show are the rich. Ray gets a call to attend to a problem at a young guy’s harbourside mansion. It’s a cold grey place made of sharp edges. A beautiful young woman is sprawled dead on his expensive sofa. To the rich kid, she’s just a liability. To Ray she’s someone’s daughter. Feed her to the pigs, he’s instructed. He buries her instead, behind the pig farm, in a small gesture of humanity against the dark night. In another episode, Ray’s elderly boxing gym owner pal kills himself after losing money in a scam. Ray finds the scammer — a ponce living in luxury, drinking $4,000-a-bottle wine. We root for Ray as he leaves him dangling from his ceiling. The show’s greatest villain is a rich mob boss. He hosts Ray on his boat, offering him caviar (Ray’s never tried the stuff, refuses, unimpressed). He drives a Porsche. He doesn’t think twice before killing two grey nomad bystanders on a job. On the same job Ray bonds with a girl also working for the boss. Ray sheds a tear when the boss kills her instead of delivering her to a hospital after an accident. Such are the careless habits of the rich.

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

— The Great Gatsby

The pedophile murderer is suspiciously middle class. Even the posh mum from Ray’s daughter’s school is insufferable. These people aren’t any better than Ray and his bedeviled working class fiends. They’re worse. There’s something deeply Australian about this contempt for the wealthy. Everyone’s a sinner in Mr Inbetween, rich and poor. Everyone’s condemned, but only the convict has a soul. The moments that matter happen in the back of a shack or in the car or on a dilapidated couch between brothers or a man and his daughter. Ray is immune to the charms of the glitzy, untempted by those false gods. There are no gods in these forsaken parts. All they’ve got is each other.

There is no social mobility in Mr Inbetween. We know Ray will never kill his way to wealth. The closest we get to entrepreneurship is Gaz’s porn filming. A couple hundred grand is proper treasure to these people, as they shoot and stab and wrestle each other for a buck. You can’t quite tell, you can’t quite see, but just out of view, you know the game is rigged. Just roaches swarming over the scraps.

There are no happy families in Mr Inbetween. Broken families, wife bashers, child beaters, drug addicts. Our hero is one of the best, and he’s a divorced killer whose idea of atonement is dropping cash to the mother he made a widow after killing the wrong guy. The world is not empty of goodness, but what goodness we see is weak, muted on the outskirts of this hell. Ray’s ex wife has remarried and they’re raising their daughter Christian. A small candle whose light fails to pierce the darkness around it. It doesn’t stop Ray’s daughter walking in on him having sex or trying drugs or finding his gun and shooting it into her bedroom wall.

Ray has a moral compass, but the world is complex. There’s good violence and there’s bad violence. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But he doesn’t have a bar of the wife and child beaters of his anger management class. Like in The Sopranos, women are angels in this hell, purer beings bedeviled and brutalised by its fiends. Ray’s daughter, his ex wife and his ex/girlfriend are good people, and it’s Ray’s job to protect them. The most poignant moments of the show are when he fails to.

Ray Shoesmith doesn’t dream of more. There’s no escape, no golden ticket. No beachfront retirement, no last big score. The game is rigged, and he knows it. He’s not a kingpin, not a mastermind—just another crook clawing for scraps in a country built on them. But at least he has a code. At least he’s got a mate or two. At least he’s got his daughter. The rich skate by, the weak get crushed, and the best a man like Ray can do is watch his own. There’s no glory waiting for Ray. He just clocks in, shifts gears, and drives into the night. A cabbie. A ghost. A crawler.

Down came a jumbuck to drink at the billabong,
Up jumped the swagman and grabbed him with glee,
And he sang as he stowed that jumbuck in his tucker bag,
"You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."

(Chorus)

Up rode the squatter, mounted on his thoroughbred,
Down came the troopers—one, two, three,
"Where’s the jolly jumbuck you’ve got in your tucker bag?"
"You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."

(Chorus)

Up jumped the swagman and sprang into the billabong,
"You’ll never take me alive!" said he,
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong,
"You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda, with me."

— (Parts of) Waltzing Matilda by Banjo Paterson