ABSTRACT
East West 101, set in Sydney, offers an engaging way of observing how cultural complexes surface in multi-racial cities. Sydney is the largest city in Australia, containing 20.5% of the Australian population. It is one of the most multi-cultural cities in the world with significant numbers of its inhabitants of British descent, of Aboriginal descent, and of Mediterranean and Asian origin, with Vietnamese, former Yugoslavians, Lebanese, Māori, Pacific Islanders, and a fast-growing Muslim population. Ethnically diverse immigrants from distressed countries suffuse the urban culture. It is a city composed of many “contact zones”; Sydney, the site of the original 1788 convict settlement, is also a city of “a truant disposition” (to borrow a nice phrase from Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii).
East West 101 presents a fictional multi-ethnic crime squad working in Sydney. The squad engages a cross-section of criminal connections on local and international scale, while simultaneously handling internal intrigue and personal tension. The squad's condition is, according to the producers, “a metaphor for East and West, for the conscious and unconscious, for reconciliation and difference, for hope versus despair”. This series places Sydney in the global web, giving an international viewer insight into things rippling beneath the gloss of the highly vaunted “Emerald City”.
