Puberty Blues is a 1981 Australian film directed by Bruce Beresford. The film is based on the 1979 novel Puberty Blues, by Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette, which is a protofeminist teen novel about two 13yearold girls from the lower middle class Sutherland Shire in Sydney. The girls attempt to create a popular social status by ingratiating themselves with the Greenhill gang of surfers, who have an unrestrained attitude toward casual sex, drugs and alcohol over the course of summer.
Lette complained that the film sanitised the plot by omitting central references to miscarriage and abortion. The movie depicts a culture in which gang rape is incidental, mindless violence is amusing and hard drug use is fatal, but it was unable to address the consequences of the brutal sexual economy in which the girls must exist.Much of the obscure surfer slang of the novel was omitted from the film. The novel features some discussion about television series Number 96. One passage of the novel that mentions the title is recounted by the films protagonist in a voiceover narration, but because the series had ended by the time of the 1981 film the series title is replaced by the generic term television. ........
Source: Wikipedia