Crime Capital of Australia: Gold Coast on Screen

Abstract

The Gold Coast has a crime problem, which will not come as a surprise to the viewers of the films and television programmes that feature Australia’s sixth largest city. The vast majority of material set on the Gold Coast has criminal themes. The Gold Coast is an imagined city created, to a large degree, by a multiplicity of moving image artefacts produced by visitors. From the miles of amateur footage shot by tourists to pseudo-Hollywood blockbusters, the Gold Coast exists as a surf and sun paradise, at least in the minds of audiences around the world. However, analysis of a variety of moving image products suggests that not far behind the glitz and glamour of the beach-based boosterism is the grimy flip side of crime, corruption and desperation. This imagined paradise is encircled by sharks, both from the sea and the land. But the crime themes explored so far by the Gold Coast film industry do not address the real transgressions on which the city is founded, neither the deals that saw a city built on sand and swamp nor the dispossession of the original inhabitants.