Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses local contestations over a contentious residential development in Perth: a ‘Little India’ on the Swan River in Peppermint Grove. The proposed development has ruptured the social fabric of Perth’s elite, revealing the processes of inclusion and exclusion in this prestigious locale.

Paper long abstract:

This paper sets to look at local contestations over a controversial residential development in Perth, Western Australia. Pankaj and Radhika Oswal are in the process of constructing Australia's most expensive residence, a 'Little India' on the Swan River in Peppermint Grove. The distinctive Indian architecture coupled with the sheer scale of the development, worth over $70 million, has elicited strong responses from the local community and has attracted significant media attention over the past year. In an Australian architectural landscape that is strongly reflective of assimilationist tendencies that masquerade behind a multicultural façade, the construction of a 'little India' in Perth's most exclusive suburb has torn through the social fabric of Perth's elite.

The Oswal construction project has been the subject of much speculation, gossip and media coverage because it touches on so many contentious issues - superwealth, multiculturalism, the changing structure of the Australian upper class and the social impacts of the resources boom in the North-West of Western Australia. The media coverage surrounding the Oswal construction project in Peppermint Grove is illustrative of processes of inclusion and exclusion within Perth's social elite. These processes are dynamic and are contributing to the changing face of the city's high society in a time of economic prosperity. Contestations over what, or what is not, an appropriate home to build in Peppermint Grove point to broader anxieties over the power and the value of consumption as a means of expressing social status, class, ethnicity and wealth in an anxious nation state.