Every story is set somewhere. Very few are as bound to a specific time and place as Boy Swallows Universe.
Author Trent Dalton name-drops the South East Queensland areas of Darra, the Gold Coast hinterland, Ferny Grove, the Sunshine Coast, Springbrook Falls, Yatala, Oxley, Wacol, Inala, Corinda, Yeerongpilly, and The Gap in just the first few pages of his debut, semi-autobiographical novel.
Not because these places are cherished by locals, or even particularly important locations for the plot. He does it because there would be no Eli Bell, as we know our precocious 12-year-old protagonist, if not for the way South East Queensland — all of it — shaped him.
Eli and his brother Gus's unlikely babysitter, real-life Boggo Road jail escapee Arthur 'Slim' Halliday, puts it like this: "Light and shade, kid. No escaping the light and no escaping the shade."
It would be easy to label the working-class Brisbane suburb of Darra that Eli calls home as nothing but shade to the light's counterpart. But Eli sees it in its entirety.
"Darra is a dream. A stench. A spilt garbage bin, a cracked mirror, a paradise, a bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup filled with prawns. Domes of plastic crab meat, pig ears and pig knuckles and pig belly," he muses.
"Darra is a girl washed down a drain pipe. A boy with snot slipping from his nose, so ripe it glows on Easter night. A teenage girl stretched across a train track waiting from the express to central and beyond.
"A South African man smoking Sudanese weed. A Filipino man injecting Afghani dope next door to a girl from Cambodia sipping milk from Queensland's Darling Downs.
"Darra is my quiet sigh. My reflection on war. My dumb pre-teen longing. My home."
How on earth do you bring that to life?
Before filming for the seven-part Netflix show started, production designer Michelle McGahey visited Dalton at his present-day house in his dream suburb of The Gap in Brisbane's north-west, where they spent hours poring over the contents of a box filled with images, cards, books, comics, and car models from Dalton's childhood.
"He wanted to relive every little piece, which we did for a few hours at his dining room table," McGahey tells the ABC.
"Then we decided to get in the car and go to Darra and drive around the area where he penned the book.
"He didn't grow up in Darra, he grew up a little bit further away, but he used Darra as the base for his story."
McGahey says Dalton showed her a series of Darra houses where he'd imagined the story taking place, including a mansion atop a hill he'd assigned to local restaurateur/drug dealer Bich Dang. Then they visited the house Dalton actually grew up in.
"He hadn't been back there for a long, long time," she says.
"We pulled up out the front, he knocked on the door and this big dog came out and we're thinking, 'Oh god, we're going to get our arms chewed off'.
"Then someone came out and Trent gave an explanation of who he was and, while he was talking to the chap at the door, I stuck my head underneath the house to see the secret room."
And there it was. The real-life secret underground escape room
(Minus the red telephone).
"Trent was like, 'Oh god, I just thought I imagined it. The secret room is really there, it's really there'. But it wasn't really a room. It was more like a box of bricks," McGahey continues.
A few weeks later, she returned to Darra without Dalton. It's one thing for a writer to point out the places they imagined their story unfolding, it's another to use those locations for a months-long TV shoot. Netflix needed something different.
"We wanted the house to be something like the house he grew up in, but not entirely, because that was actually incredibly dour. We wanted to give it some sort of light, some sort of hope, even though those little dwellings do express that, even in their rawness," McGahey explains.
"Nineteen eighties Darra felt like the 1960s–70s, because Darra had a lot of community housing and immigration, so there was a cookie-cutter style household that was built for a lot of the immigrants that were coming from various parts of Europe at that time.
"People were using [older] furniture, which meant the colours were vibrant. We leaned into that retro style and vibe because [Eli's parents] Frankie and Lyle's house had to feel homely, hopeful, a little bit of sunshine there, because [they] were trying to create this beautiful moment for the boys.
"But of course, part of their house still had to have a darkness to it."
After all, this was a home that also needed to serve as the backdrop for Frankie's detox. It needed to plausibly house a wardrobe hiding the entrance to the tunnel that snaked underneath the house towards the secret room. The kitchen needed to function as a kitsch family gathering place and play host to a certain finger-severing scene.
The search led them beyond Brisbane
"We had a look around Darra and Oxley and Inala, all fantastic areas. So much going on there. But too much for us," McGahey says.
"We needed something really raw that was untouched, sort of bleak but not too bleak, and we needed to find two houses next to each other because [family friend/neighbour] Gene's house needed to be next to Lyle's [for the plot].
"We [production] were based in Stapylton on the Gold Coast and one day our location team explored the area and found a few streets in Beenleigh [a Logan suburb] that were pretty untouched. And, all of a sudden, there were two houses, side by side, for lease at the same time.
"Beenleigh is now under gentrification, and development is pretty aggressive here … All these iconic architectural features from the 60s, 70s and 80s — even the 90s — are going. We were really fortunate to find the locations we did. Had we waited another one or two years, I think [these places] just wouldn't be there."
They then found Eli's estranged father Robert's house in the north side suburb of Wavell Heights.
"It was on a corner block, with this really beautiful Royal Poinciana tree out the front. It was of the right period, and had very little done to it, so it just had a really beautiful, homely, but run-down vibe to it."
The scenes set in the affluent suburb of The Gap, where Eli, Lyle, Gus and Frankie journey in search of a used Atari games console, were actually filmed in Chelmer in Brisbane's south-west.
They shot the scenes at Lyle and Frankie's house and Robert's house at the end of winter, when the frangipani trees were still naked and the grass still looked dry to make both suburbs feel "bare and hopeful, but hopeless at the same time".
On the other hand, "The Gap" scenes were deliberately filmed in the lush subtropical green of full spring.
"[That's] where Eli goes, 'My god, people have trees and swings and treehouses and dogs and stairs up to their houses'… It had to feel fertilised and buoyant and bright because that's what drives him to want to get out of where he is."
The sense of time was added to that of place through all the usual suspects: 80s-style costume, hair (specifically Lyle and Gus's matching mullets) and makeup, vehicles, shopfronts, newspapers and cookbooks, calendars, and countless other props.
Production sourced thousands of period-appropriate props from various op shops, Facebook Marketplace sellers and eBay collectors.
Somehow, none proved as challenging as finding 80s XXXX stubby holders.
Production eventually found a stash from a diver who had discovered them at the bottom of the Nerang River, and graphic artists were tasked with restoring them to their former glory with historically accurate labels.
McGahey believes the 'whole universe came together to make this project'
"One of the things we said from the beginning was that if we can make Trent happy with anything that we do, then we've satisfied our audience. Because he's our number one audience," she says.
"When Trent came to the set and saw it dressed and ready a few days before we were going to shoot, he was incredibly overcome with how it looked and felt.
"He ended up being very grateful for the beauty that we created."
"Anyone who was here in 1986 will feel seen," Dalton told ABC News on the eve of the show's premiere.
"It's as Brisbane as I've ever seen anything in my life, and I would only have dreamed of seeing a show like this when I was 12."
Boy Swallows Universe is now streaming on Netflix.