A young schoolteacher descends into personal moral degradation after finding himself stranded in a brutal, menacing town in outback Australia.

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

When greed threatens the livelihood of an Italian monastery, a monk flees with the formula for their special liquor.