A teenage girl has to terms with her family and herself when her mother falls critically ill. She decides to leave school to look after her family, which turns outto be an enormous challenge, as she has to deal with her father’s fanatical religion, her brother’s experimentation with drugs and homosexuality, her desire for the wrong boy, and her younger brother and sister’s inability to cope with the family’s instability.
Acting
Nadine Garner's raw, unsentimental performance anchors everything.
Writing
Stacked crises that somehow avoid melodrama through specificity.
Director
Don McLennan
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Part of Australia's late-80s 'social realist' wave, rarely distributed outside the country. Bill Hunter was already a national treasure; this cemented Nadine Garner's reputation as the era's most naturalistic young actor.
The original novel by Sue Woolfe faced censorship battles for its frank depiction of adolescent sexuality and drug use—McLennan's adaptation keeps the edge but adds visual poetry to Phoebe's suffocating domestic spaces.
AU
