For all the talk of fun in the sun, night-time glamour and an enviable lifestyle, there is a darker side to the Gold Coast. On society’s fringes, in the heavily populated and impoverished housing commission estates and dustbowl subdivisions, life’s struggle offers little to envy. Omega Park is one such estate, a place of want, crime, drug use, discontent and disaffection. In this bleak existence, the Omega Park kids kill time by playing spotlight and sticking together; the adults kill time by killing brain cells with dope and booze. This is not the Gold Coast of the tourism ads and postcards, but is a representation of the cold reality of every modern city.
Omega Park is multi-faceted work that switches between the past and the present. In a dramatic opening, Damian “Dingo” Patterson witnesses Jacob Box’s death in a car crash, the result of long-simmering tensions between Omega Park’s residents, known as “Parkees”, and the police. As Jacob dies in the wreck of an old Torana, the passenger, his mother Leo, flees the scene and triggers a stand-off and rioting between the police and Omega Park residents.
