Summer of The Seventeenth Doll By Ray Lawler

This summer, everything is different.

Larrikin cane cutters Barney and Roo have tempered the past sixteen years working the punishing Queensland sugarcane fields by letting off steam down in Melbourne during the layoff season with their barmaid girlfriends, Olive and Nancy. But this summer, everything is different. One of the barmaids has 'settled down' and married a city bloke so a replacement date has had to be found. This summer—the seventeenth—will challenge them and everything they believed to be true.

From the cane fields to the city, Ray Lawler's iconic story of passion, bittersweet romance, and the yearning for lost youth has endured, not through nostalgia, nor because it spawned a new age in Australian writing, but because the characters and their dilemmas are so true: beautifully observed, humorous, poignant.

Written by Ray Lawler
Directed by Denny Lawrence