Secrets and lies on the South Coast: 'The Caterpillar Wish'

For a while back in the later seventies and early eighties there was a tenacious stream of Australian films that chronicled rites of passage or coming of age. It was tempting to see them as collectively saying something about the state of the nation or at least about the state of its renascent film industry. You could have been forgiven for wondering if both nation and industry were going to hover forever on the brink of puberty.