Cirrus@Austlit

Debbie and Sue are accepted into Greenhill Beach's gang, an elite group of teenagers occupying a particular stretch of Cronulla beachfront. As surfie groupies, Debbie and Sue find out that they are expected to submit to male whims and play out 'strange' rituals, such as not eating or going to the bathroom when a boy is around. The girls' life mainly consists of doing what everyone else does: watching the boys surf, having sex with them (in the back seat of cars and at home-alone parties), and getting drunk. The narrative maintains a humorously ironic distance from the awfulness of the scene, particularly through the use of narration. The boys, though portrayed as collectively dominant, are individually consigned to the margins, while Debbie and Sue ultimately break out of the confines of male-imposed rules.

'Puberty Blues is an Australian classic which chronicles a special moment of our history. In the early 1970s, the middle baby boomers were coming into their adolescence and early adulthood. The sexual revolution was in full flow. In America "teenagerdom" had come into its own in the sixties. It happened here in the seventies, with the arrival of drugs and the anti-Vietnam fed youth rebellion. And the wild mood finds its apotheosis in surf culture. Puberty Blues is a picture of Australian suburban life in revolution as the wild kids get their rocks off, exploring the worlds of the parents in a context where money and loans are much cheaper, divorce is much easier, full employment and prosperity abound, conventional morality is shifting and everything is endlessly possible.'

Source: Australian Television Information Archive. (Sighted: 20/8/2013)