‘Growing up was never easy’: coming of age in the teen film

‘Growing up was never easy’: coming of age in the teen film

The teen film is one of the most diverse and prolific genres of Australian cinema and has been since its emergence in the 1970s. This chapter briefly establishes the early characteristics of the Australian teen film in the late twentieth century, before examining the genre in the 2000s. It argues that while hybrid teen films have featured steadily in film history since the 1970s, it is the coming-of-age film that has been, and remains, the most popular iteration of the genre. Moreover, in postmillennial Australian cinema, there are three main trends that characterise coming-of-age films: (1) quirky/fish-out-of-water; (2) queer; and (3) Indigenous coming-of-age films. While these cycles share a central motif of protagonists’ emergent independent identities and acceptance of self, they employ that motif in very different ways. The similarities and differences of these films are examined, ultimately arguing that they collectively negotiate a place for the representation of a much more diverse spectrum of youth as well as expand and complicate one of the most popular genres of Australian cinema.