Dinesh Mathew

Nineteen-year-old bedroom rapper Dev has always been called a 'coconut': brown on the outside, white on the inside. Ashamed of his Australian accent and mocked by community members whenever he speaks Fiji Hindi, he has given up on his family's language. His cultural displacement comes to a head when he accidentally ruins his grandpa's Hindu funeral ceremony, knocking the urn containing his ashes into the nearby creek. Everything changes when his sharp-tongued, non-English-speaking grandma hears Dev swear at a stranger and responds in kind. Their new secret language becomes a bridge across grief and a way back into culture and language.

Set inside the offices of the “Nation Building Authority”, a federal government organisation responsible for overseeing major infrastructure projects, Utopia explores that moment when bureaucracy and grand dreams collide.

Follow the stories of two families living at opposite ends of the freeway. Bess Denyar is a doctor with a posh mother, Margaret, an architect husband, Danny Bright, and twin 13-year-olds at a private school, Oscar and Edwina. When Bess finds out that she is adopted, she is stunned, but even more so when she meets her birth parents, Wayne and Julie Wheeler. She also discovers that she has three siblings: Amber, Kayne and Brianna. The bogan Wheelers head up a drag racing team in the outer suburbs and are thrilled to discover the daughter they thought they had lost.