Queensland Film Development Office

Alma can't stand to have one more birthday without seeing her estranged daughter, Elizabeth, who lives in Sydney, Australia.

In this moody black and white drama, very much in the mode of the American "western," but with its own film noir characteristics, a whole town is heaved out of its doldrums when a pair of mysterious strangers come visiting. In the beginning of the film, Angel is traveling with his friend Max on a ship to Honeyfield, a town on the coast of Australia. He is coming home to die. Instead, he dies on board the ship, willing his boots to Angel, and an unopened package to someone called "The Dead Man," in Honeyfield. Also on the ship is a man named Tatts, a far less pleasant personality. When Angel gets off to head into Honeyfield, Tatts decides to follow along unseen. The package, Angel was told, contains something its intended recipient has been looking for without knowing it. On finding the recipient, a mean-spirited old man who is more or less the boss and owner of the town, he learns that the package contains opium.

Mercy Steele remembers her close-to idyllic childhood in rural Queensland in the twenties. Images of the landscape, abundant foods and fruits interspersed with reconstructed snatches of the way things were, show a simple life that belies the tragedy which her family later suffered. Constructed images of a lush and beautiful place suggest an uncomplicated life of harmony and abundance reminiscent of a late 19th century European way of seen Antipodean landscapes.