This is an unremittingly grim melodrama about a group of hard-luck, victimized aborigines with no opportunity in life who live in a slum boarding-house on the outskirts of Sydney. Coping via pills, drugs, alcohol, and other destructive means, this collection of misfits should not be taken as representative of aborigines in general. Jack Collins (Tommy Lewis) runs the boarding house and dominates his tenants like a minor dictator. He is having an affair with Laura Wentworth (Katrina Foster) who is also sleeping with Andy White (Ralph Cotterill), an innocent country bumpkin compared to the boarders here. Laura herself is trying to overcome the emotional trauma of incest and a subsequent abortion at the age of 16, while her brother Jim (Mark Lee) is seriously suicidal. When white racists are not causing problems for the aborigines, then the police fill the breach -- there is no clear way out of their abysmal existence.