WORKING-CLASS HEROES ABC’s The Heights and Social Stratification

Arcadia Heights isn’t really supposed to be anywhere in particular. Like Ramsay Street, Summer Bay and Wandin Valley before it, it doesn’t represent a real place, but more an idea of a place. Just as Neighbours plays out in a typical suburban street, Home and Away is set in a generic beachfront community and A Country Practice unfolds in an archetypal small country town, the ABC’s The Heights creates a broad canvas from a setting little explored by Australian soap operas to date: the typical inner-city neighbourhood.

It’s a bold and timely choice. Up until now, the Australian soap landscape has been largely, if not quite entirely, the province of the comfortable middle class. To be fair, Seven’s long-running A Country Practice had a large, rotating supporting cast of farmers and rural workers, but its focus remained resolutely on Wandin Valley’s professional class, specifically its doctors. Similarly, the same network’s Home and Away initially centred on the foster home run by the Fletcher family – but, in the three decades since the show’s debut, this attention to lower-socio-economic concerns has gradually been eroded.

The Heights refutes such coyness; from the show’s marketing material alone, it would be reasonable for audiences to expect that the principal characters – residents of the Arcadia Towers community-housing complex that