Sunshine vs. Carlton, which Nate picks up on in an interesting way above.

The “givenness” of the economy of drug production and distribution in the narrative, alongside the deadly contest about relative positions of individuals in that economy. There’s no suggestion that even the police will be able to restrict the flow of drugs and cash, only that they may be able to restore an imbalance which has led violence to exceed acceptable limits.

The “ordinariness” of the settings for key events. This happens in every episode, but one which can stand in for the rest for the moment is Carl’s eventual arrest as “barbecue-stopper”.

Club scenes showing money being made in the city; suburban scenes showing it being spent in or on the home.

The comparisons to be made between the domestic lives of crims like Carl, and the troubled, overworked police officers.

Anyway thanks all for comments so far.

i’m not really able to answer michelle’s questions outside of the claims we would make for the text, which as nate shows, has several competing representations of suburban aspiration.

i will just add that the women seem much more obviously enamoured with money and possessions than men, for reasons i will explore in the book (to my mind this is possibly because they hold such an ambiguous position in relation to what is such a homoerotically-charged set of relationships that drive the action. that’s right – i’m proposing a queer reading; not only that, a feminist queer reading! more on that later)

nate, your comments are really interesting in light of a conversation i had with my cousin the other week. he used to work as a bouncer in the 1990s in sydney and then went on to run a security firm. for him, in sydney, the crims with the stable code were the white anglos; the ‘new generation of crime’ directly attributable to the growing ambitions of migrant kids from the western suburbs for whom ‘the old rules’ didn’t inspire loyalty and who made up their own rules haphazardly and dangerously, a la Williams.

for these reasons it will be fascinating to watch the new season, which reportedly will be offering the pre-history of the moment when these so-called rules were established (how different precincts were territorialised, we might say.) this, alongside the clear ethnic tensions in my cousin’s comments that continue in various suburban milieux gives obvious room for the show’s expansion right up to the present.

finally, this makes industry sense of why season 1 worked so well – the potential audience were probably already used to an as you say ‘ethnocised’ representation of underworld crime through the mafia genre as well as the popular press. i’m not sure what would have happened if the show had been pitched around chopper’s contemporaries from the outset, for instance.

the lack of family in williams’ case is certainly symbolic of many things… that’s a great point to note, thanks.

although underbelly reveals the dark side of club and rave scenes, the nostalgia with which the old guard is represented complicates the notion of criminals as beyond a moral code.

what is most interesting in this regard is that although both groups – carlton crew and williams’ crew – are highly ethnocised the leaders of each camp (gatto and williams) are polarised. williams seems whiter, more aussie bogan than most other characters and he has no extended family. williams’ attainment of the australian dream, then, compliments your analysis because he is ‘more australian’ than the others.

of course one could also argue that williams has little investment in the dream at all and he attains such things purely because he has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it. or, perhaps to satisfy the demands of his charming lover: “suck my fuckin’ toe jam”. the fact that he rarely, if ever, expresses his desire for the australian dream lends some support to this reading.

just some basic thoughts,
nate