Heatwave is a 1982 Australian drama directed by Phillip Noyce (of Dead Calm, Patriot Games, and Rabbit-Proof Fence fame), starring Judy Davis, Richard Moir, Chris Haywood, Bill Hunter, John Gregg, and John Meillon. The film is based on the 1975 murder of journalist and community activist Juanita Nielsen
, one of two productions to come out of the Australian New Wave inspired by the case, the other being the previous year's The Killing of Angel Street.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- Community-Threatening Construction: Houseman and the other developers plan to bulldoze a block of terraced houses and kick out the tenants and squatters living there in order to build high-end apartments in their place.
- The Complainer Is Always Wrong: Although most of the tenants are sympathetic to Kate's cause, one older resident berates her and the other protestors as idiots and showoffs in a television news interview.
- Dirty Cop: The Sydney police are suggested to be in cahoots with the Eden Project developers, having enabled them to carry out their assassination of Kate.
- Intrepid Reporter: The protagonist Kate Dean is an investigative reporter and community activist who, in addition to protesting the construction of the Eden Project, is looking into the shady dealing of the project's developers. For this, they plan to eliminate her.
- Meaningful Name: The leading developer of the housing project is named Houseman.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Kate gives one during one of her protests, calling out Houseman and the other "arseholes" for their uncaring attitudes towards the neighbourhood's working-class residents.
- The Thing That Would Not Leave: The tenants and squatters occupying the old houses refuse to be bullied into being evicted from the property.
- This Is What the Building Will Look Like: We briefly see a model of how the new block of flats is supposed to look.
- Upper-Class Twit: Houseman and the other developers generally come across this way, being completely uncaring towards the tenants occupying the houses he intends to demolish to make way for his high-end apartments.
