Stanley Evans, a Welsh schoolteacher, decides to emigrate to Australia for a better life but ends up working in a school in the dead-end town of Kookaburra Springs. He forms a school choir and decides to compete in a singing competition in Sydney

A schoolteacher, stuck in a teaching post in an arid backwater, stops off in a mining town on his way home for Christmas. Discovering a local gambling craze that may grant him the money to move back to Sydney for good, he embarks on a five-day nightmarish odyssey of drinking, gambling, and hunting.