ABSTRACT
Cinema amplifies our most haunting collective complexes, and in this paper Terrie Waddell argues that the concept of “girlshine”, one of the frequently recurring obsessions in contemporary Australian film, is one of them. Waddell sees this archetypal eruption, largely imagined as girl–women in their liminal years (16–21), to be a development of the lost child complex that feeds on our collective trauma of post-colonial alienation, separation anxiety (from the European womb), and geographical vulnerability. In contrast to the lost child, the girlshine complex implies a sense of everlasting potential: of being held in a suspended state of “becoming”—unable to “become”. The figure embodying this stage of development emerges as a suggestion of adulthood. She seldom grows up. In the bigger, more symbolic picture, though, the girlshine figure addresses Australia's attempt to guide itself from one stage of development to another—from lost, to an awareness of future promise.
Films concentrating on girlshine are often set against the Australian bush/outback, among the most ancient and untouched of environments, and are popularly thought of as “she”. The landscape seems to protectively watch over this figure/complex, as if she might one day emerge from the liminal and come to assume maturity. Terrie Waddell explores these ideas through three representative examples from contemporary Australian cinema: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975), The Year My Voice Broke (John Duigan, 1987), and Beautiful Kate (Rachel Ward, 2009). The textual analysis of each film foregrounds the gender divisiveness, obsessive fixation with, and cultural resistance to transcend the girlshine complex.
