Puberty Blues

TV remakes of classic Aussie films like Puberty Blues continue to celebrate strong friendships and question our national character.

Ever been dropped by a ‘moll’? Danny Dixon has. After grunting at Sue (Brenna Harding) whenever she asks a question throughout the Puberty Blues TV series, he seems surprised when Sue drops him in front of his mates. On Cronulla’s beaches in the late 1970s, it’s the boys who do the dumping.

But Sue Knight’s no moll – despite how liberally the label is used by the Greenhill gang of surfers – and she’s not taking their toxic masculinity anymore. The moment’s an assertion of self-worth that pivots the series, which follows Sue and her best friend Debbie’s (Ashleigh Cummings) journey to join the cool clique. But the strength of their friendship helps them realise they were the cool ones all along and defy the beach-bro sexism.

It’s also a moment that doesn’t appear in Bruce Beresford’s 1981 adaptation of Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel. When the book was released in 1979, it scandalised polite society with its raw and authentic depiction of Australian adolescence, complete with trash-talking vernacular, surf, drugs and sex. Kids clambered after it like an icy pole on a summer’s day while parents preferred to bury their heads in the sand.

Both the book and film were huge successes, challenging the age-old assumption that the book is always better than the movie – and the remake, which ran for two seasons from 2012, casts doubt on the idea that remakes are always lesser.

The original Puberty Blues coasted into public consciousness in the middle of the Australian New Wave, the creative and commercial revival of the local film industry that took Australian stories global. Featuring classics like My Brilliant Career, Mad Max, Wake in Fright and Picnic at Hanging Rock, the Australian New Wave helped define ideas of Australian culture and identity at home and abroad.

In Puberty Blues, the beach is a microcosm of a chauvinistic Australia facing a much-needed cultural and social reckoning as the pervasive misogyny of surf culture is dismantled by women’s empowerment.

Similarly, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (based on Joan Lindsay’s mystery novel) suggests an untamed and unnatural landscape that swallows three boarding-school students and their teacher. Like Puberty Blues, it exposes oppressive social conventions of Australia at a certain moment in time, presenting a gloomily rendered country strangled by Victorian attitudes, which seemingly reflects the girls’ yearning. The 2018 TV remake trades Weirs’ impressionistic vision for lurid vividness, its overexposed aesthetic more akin to Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, which along with Picnic's modern score, reminds us of the ongoing tyranny of gender expectations.

What both remakes offer is a chance to further explore their characters. Picnic retells the story from the point of view of head mistress Hester Appleyard (Natalie Dormer), giving her an anti-hero history that highlights her own persecution by the attitudes of the time, while in the original she’s more a patriarchal accomplice.

Similarly, the Puberty Blues remake broadens its scope to explore the relationships of the parents, which are just as messy as their kids’, deepening the original film’s themes to interrogate suburban malaise and masculinity in crisis.  “I think that’s one of the big decisions we made on the show, bring in the parents, create them as characters and show that era so you understand the gap between generations,” series writer Tony McNamara told us. “That’s why I love TV so much, you've got time with people and the audience can connect to them over a long period, you can show different aspects of who they are and explore their characters.”

Despite the dark subjects, there’s tenderness and humour in both remakes, particularly between the main women characters, whose stories still make us question gender politics and interrogate our national character – just as the Australian New Wave did decades ago.