Lost in space: Gold Coast characters wandering home(less)

Abstract The Gold Coast is a multiply liminal space, often represented throughout mainstream media as a holidayworld in which to escape everyday life and structured work routines. Represented as a tourist destination and space for transitions – as a space in which to get lost or lose one’s self – Gold Coast locals are misrepresented as everyday tourists, criminals and dole bludgers, essentially wanderers floating around and through the city limits. Local literary fictions capture this sense of alienation among Gold Coast locals. Georgia Savage’s The House Tibet (1992), in particular, complicates local wandering, with the text representing her runaway protagonists not as living a leisurely existence but rather experiencing the idea of homemaking as a kind of labour necessitated by socioeconomic disadvantage. In this realist narrative, Savage’s depiction of adolescent homelessness advances under-represented views of the multifaceted city while dispelling tourist myths about the Gold Coast as a youthfully unburdened site. Meanwhile, the disenfranchised boys of Amy Barker’s Omega Park (2009) see themselves as aliens in their home city and wander as a means of distancing themselves from a place in which they are trapped. This interdisciplinary investigation of narratives of wandering on the Gold Coast reveals belonging as a dynamic process of placemaking and homemaking, and a privilege of post-colonial habitation and socioeconomic comfort.