Battler-Trollop-Mole-Slut-Bogan - The Beach Babes You Don't See.

Terrie Waddell, Department of Media Studies, School of Arts and Media, La Trobe University

T.Waddell@latrobe.edu.au

I grew up in a small town on the Victorian coast. The beach represented everything about the 70s that the PC 90s tried to snuff out. Surf&Sand embodied that passive/active gender cliché of 'boys surf - girls watch while wearing an excessive amount of jewelry and kohl'. There was however, a type of girl/woman who passed the 70s & 80s largely maligned and unexamined ‘the scrubber’. She was rough as guts, oversexed and wild. I remember her as a beefy presence that dominated the school bus on our way from Geelong to the coast. She knew how to handle men but was always reduced by them.

Although this (dominantly Australian) fusion of battler-trollop-mole-slut-bogan has made a significant impact in film, rarely has there been any genuine concern for the complexity of this character motif - she's usually reduced to a peripheral piece of light entertainment. There are vague references to her in Puberty Blues (Beresford, 1981) and the battling bridesmaids of Muriel's Wedding (Hogan, 1994) come close, but the films Fran (Glenda Hambly 1985) and Praise (John Curran 1998) are exceptional for their insight. They peel the scrubber raw to expose the vulnerability of an unruly and highly sexed woman unable to survive without clinging to 'the phallus' (literally and symbolically) for physical and emotional sustenance. Put Fran and Cynthia in a string-bikini, on the beach, during the tourist season and you have an idea of the ambiance of my adolescence - it wasn't Sea-Change. In this paper I'm going to unpack these characters and explore the Australianness of the scrubber.