underground is set in a fictional Australian city, Bidawal. Details of its notable places may be found here



Bidawal has about 650,000 people, and lies on the far north-eastern coast of Victoria, in the Commonwealth Capital Territory. As the Snowy River Project finished up in the late 1960s, the migrant workers who'd come to work on that went on to the Cook Harbour Project, turning the shallow sea lake into a deep harbour. This created an industrial and trade boom in the 1970s, which faltered in the 1980s under economic rationalism. The city has a lot of abandoned factories and warehouses, and of course drains and tunnels, ideal for urban explorers. The place is crime-ridden and nasty, with a distressing amount of guns and drugs and porn and sleaze and filth.

There are about 300 murders in Bidawal annually, compared with the same number in the rest of Australia put together. This is a murder rate comparable to Washington, DC in the USA, or Jo'burg in South Africa. Assaults, rapes, burglaries and drugs offences are proportional to this.

History
Australia decided to build the capital on the coast and make it a port, instead of in a valley among paddocks. This made the place more populous and prosperous, but also more miserable and crime-ridden. It's named Bidawal after the local Aboriginal nation, and is on the site of the real-world Mallacoota. The Bidawal people was made up of refugees and exiles from other tribes, especially the Gunnai to the West. The people were largely wiped out by settlers by the late 19th century. There's blood in the ground, blood of the locals, and blood of the people of other lands who came to live in Bidawal. Bidawal was chosen as the federal capital in 1907, and work began on it in 1913, was postponed until 1921 because of the Great War. War came to the capital in March 1942 as a team of Japanese midget submarines shelled the city, and in April the same year Japanese suicide commandos raided it. The Moncrieff Monument commemorates the place in Bidawala where a Volunteer Defence Corps Lieutenant with his platoon defended the Munitions Depot for twenty-eight hours under fire against Japanese raider commandos in 1942.