A young woman furiously pedals through the back streets on her bike. She storms into a house, muttering angrily – then walks in on her dad about to hang himself. The camera zooms into her shocked face. Welcome to Swift Street.
“I was like, ‘Ooh, holy shit – this is a good way to kick off a story,’” says Tig Terera, the writer and director of SBS’s new eight-part crime drama.
The young woman is Elsie (Tanzyn Crawford), a street-smart 21-year-old whose father, Robert (Cliff Curtis), has found himself in $26,000 of debt. Despite their fractured relationship, the two team up to come up with the money together – which involves crimes of their own.
“I’d made a series of short films about my coming of age, my migration story, my first heartbreak. I wanted to make something that’s not completely about me,” says Terera. “It’s interesting exploring things that are deemed morally incorrect, showing why one might do that and still not painting them as evil.”
Swift Street explores those shades of grey: there’s no good or bad, just life itself. “When you have your back against the wall, you either crumble or you push back – and when you do push back, morality is no longer as important,” Terera says. “It’s a privilege to sit on a moral high horse … You have to eat, and sometimes you will steal.”
In order to play a father and daughter with a complex relationship, Crawford and Curtis embarked on a slow process of getting comfortable around one another – including going to see the Barbie movie together when they first met. This helped build an intimacy you can see on-screen, says Crawford.
“When you first meet someone, it’s hard to have a connection even though that’s your job as an actor,” she says. “If things seem off because we didn’t know each other that well, it worked out in our favour. I don’t think anything too lovey-dovey came until later on, by the time we had built a relationship anyway.”
Elsie and Robert are at the heart of the show, but other characters make up the colour, and trouble, in their lives: a crime boss known as the Mechanic (Eliza Matengu), Elsie’s estranged mother, Moreblessing (Bolude Watson), and new friend Tom (Keiynan Lonsdale), and a love triangle between Elsie, Tatenda (Alfred Chuol) and Aisha (Bernie Van Tiel).
Elsie’s queerness is not explicitly stated – it’s simply a part of her. “You don’t need to make a song and dance about it,” Terera says. “It’s just about the people and their personalities – that’s how I hope we should be showing sexuality on screen.”
This approach is part of what drew Crawford, who is queer herself, to the character, after years of seeing the community represented through a lens of struggle. “It’s always the trauma of coming out and [it] not going well … we’ve seen it,” she says. “Elsie is in her early 20s at this point – any conversation that she’s had about sexuality happened five years ago.”
“It’s the same with race – you don’t hear black characters talking about how they’re black,” Terera says. “Me and my friends don’t talk about being black – we just are black … It’s who I am, it’s who my friends are and it’s who my characters will always be. I know the nuances of being black Australian, and I can show that specificity on screen.”
“I don’t even know how authentically I could even tell a white story,” he adds with a laugh. “Like, what do you guys eat for dinner?”
In Swift Street, the inner-north of Melbourne is a character in itself. The vibrancy of the city comes alive, from trams zooming past to the beloved Preston Market being the centre of much of the action. Terera, who migrated to Melbourne from Zimbabwe at the age of five, grew up in the area and still resides there today; the show takes its name from a real street he once lived on.
Beside personal ties, the suburb’s rapidly changing face made it a compelling setting. “It’s a gentrified neighbourhood, known now for its cafes and bars but infamous for its criminal past,” Terera says. “I’m really interested in the idea of post-gentrified neighbourhoods – not being gentrified, because we’ve seen that in shows, when the shoe shop turns into the juice bar. OK, now that is the juice bar. Where do we go now?”
Crawford visited Melbourne for the first time to shoot the show. She was plunged right into the specifics of the city, and got to know its character quirks: “Tig was like, ‘You really have to get this exact suburb vibe’, and I was like, ‘I’m trying my best, but I’m from Perth!’”
Before Swift Street, Terera’s longest piece of work was 18 minutes. It’s been a learning curve, with the help of mentor and executive producer Lois Randall, producer Ivy Mak and Julie Eckersley, who he calls “the bravest commissioner in Australia”.
“Pretty much every single day for years, I was doing something for the first time ever, so every day it was growing pains,” Terera says. “I really hope we’ve made something that looks and feels like nothing else that has been made in Australia.”
Swift Streets starts at 8.30pm Wednesday 24 April on SBS and SBS OnDemand
