"Australian males should be buried at the age of 12 and dug up again at 20."
— anonymous wit

Bodgie arrest . . . A protesting youth gesticulates wildly in a police car as his companion with a bloody nose presses himself into a corner after bodgies battle police in a wild melee at the Brisbane Exhibition Ground in April 1959. Picture: Eric Donnelly

IF people were butterflies, our awkward teenage years would surely be spent hidden behind the walls of nice warm cocoons.

Unfortunately for all those concerned we are not butterflies; and the enormous transformation from teenager to adult must take place under the harsh gaze of an unforgiving world — our fashion disasters, our social faux pas and our pubescent skin complaints out there for everyone to see.

A lucky few will grow, develop a glorious set of wings and fly off effortlessly into adulthood. But, for most of us, being a teenager means blundering around noisily, trying on several sets of gaudy, ill-fitting wings before finding a pair which will allow us to fly — or at least fall more gracefully — into the adult world.

It is an exciting, often embarrassing, always entertaining journey which defines who we are as individuals and stamps us as part of a unique generation.

Since the teenager first emerged as a distinct social group in the 1950s, societies around the world have struggled to deal with these young upstarts, and Queensland is no different.

In fact, we probably have a few more outrageous tales to tell than most — from the country's first rock'n'roll riot, in which the Brisbane Stadium was almost destroyed in the 1950s, to the hippie communes which took over our northern rainforests in the 1970s; to the schoolies who wreaked havoc on the Gold and Sunshine coasts in the 1980s and 90s.

And times have changed from the 1950s — when dancing at a concert was enough to get you arrested.

Queensland's role as an American command post during World War II ensured this rural and somewhat naive backwater would be hit harder than any other Australian state by the post-war emergence of that most feared and misunderstood of creatures: the teenager. Before the war teenagers, of course, existed, but they were never viewed as a distinct social group as they are today.