Crushed

"Poison. I saw her top glitter ‘Poison’. Then she turned and walked away.
The moon, it went behind a cloud. The darkness, it kind of swallowed her."

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On December 12, 1988, ‘Sunny Girl’ Susie turned sweet sixteen. Her boyfriend Jason, gave her a Poison t-shirt, her best friend, Kelly, gave her a name necklace and Kelly’s boyfriend, Dazza, gave her a handful of pills. That night Susie Greene disappeared. Her body and kidnapper were never found.



Twenty-two years later, the blood splattered t-shirt of the missing schoolgirl is unearthed from the Australian scrub and her best friend Kelly is reluctantly drawn back to her childhood home. Together with Dazza and Jason, once the most important men in her life, Kelly faces the bleakest of high school reunions. As the police dig deeper, Susie’s classmates are forced to confront memories of a night they’d hoped to leave buried in their adolescence forever.

 

Captivated by tales of missing girls, Melita Rowston grew up in the Melbourne suburb that was grief-stricken by the disappearance of eight-year-old Eloise Worledge, snatched from her bed under the cover of night. Despite one of the largest manhunts in Victoria’s history, Eloise was never found.

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Rowston remembers being warned by her mother to keep her bedroom window shut at night “unless she wanted to be taken like little Eloise was.”  ‘Stranger danger’ was the catch cry of the day. Rapists lurked in the scrublands and abductors prowled the night streets ...

Statistics show that during the 1980s Australia had the highest rate of child abductions in the world. This speaks of a sinister violence that sleeps beneath the sun-bleached facade of our laid back culture.

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The ‘lost child’ myth has haunted us since colonisation, throwing up deep-seated anxieties around stolen innocence, lost potential and what some say appears to be a national death wish. Whether that child is lost in Marcus Clarke’s 19th century literature, staggering through McCubbin’s Heidelberg School paintings or disappearing into the shadows of Joan Lindsay’s Hanging Rock, she is a recurring motif in our national narratives. 

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Rowston felt compelled to explore this myth and put the mystery of the missing girl centre stage. CRUSHED is the result: a play that speaks specifically to Rowston’s own generation, Gen X, a ‘lost generation’ itself, steeped in ambivalence about the future. The imagined story of the disappearance of Susie Greene and the impact on her three best friends 22 years’ later deftly taps into these fears and captures with ironic hindsight the spirit of the 80s – the Nirvana generation: ‘Oh well, whatever, nevermind’.

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An acerbic and fast-paced Gen X tale, a murder mystery/who-dunnit, revelling in the current 80‘s retro zeitgeist, Crushed explores the sinister violence that lurks beneath the sun-bleached facade of our ‘she’ll be right’ culture.