The story concerns a couple, Peter (Hargreaves) and Marcia (Behets), who, along with their dog, go for a weekend camping trip. The pair show incredible disrespect for nature, especially Peter, such as polluting, killing a dugong, throwing lit cigarette butts in dry bush, and spraying insecticide, among other transgressions. As tensions between the couple escalate, nature is not pleased with their environmental wrongdoing and starts to strike back, first by an eagle and possum attacking Peter, and then through more insidious means...
In the early 1960s, Sandy (John Jarratt), Boo (Steve Bisley), Scollop (Mel Gibson) and Robbie (Phil Avalon) drive to the beaches north of Sydney for a surfing weekend. The boys are planning to give Sandy a memorable ‘one last fling’ before his impending marriage. Tension flares between university-educated Sandy and ocker Boo when Sandy decides not to join in the fun. At a local dance, Boo seduces Caroline (Debbie Forman), the teenage daughter of a caravan park owner (James Elliott) who discovers what has happened and comes looking for Boo with a gun.
The film has a very thin plot which is no more than a vehicle to link together the concert footage. It concerns the adventures of Ashley Wallace (Robert Hughes), a naïve DJ on Radio 2TW, who normally presents a through-the-night country and western-themed show. In spite of this, he is sent by the station's boss (Bruce Barry) to get an in-depth interview ("Not an interview, a dialogue", demands his boss) with the group, which is to be aired on the day ABBA leave Australia. Needless to say, Ashley, who has never done an interview before, singularly fails, mainly because he has forgotten to pack his press card, although the fact that he is unable to buy a ticket doesn't help matters either. Armed with his trusty reel-to-reel tape recorder, Ashley is forced to follow the group all over Australia, beginning in Sydney, and then travelling, in order, to Perth, Adelaide, and Melbourne, experiencing repeated run-ins with the group's very protective bodyguard (Tom Oliver), as well as his increasingly exasperated boss. Throughout the movie, we see Ashley interviewing members of the public, asking them if and why they like ABBA. Almost all the comments are positive, but he interviews a man who is driven mad by his ABBA-obsessed twelve-year-old, and another girl who thinks ABBA are over-the-top.
The film's unlikely protagonist is a mild-mannered window peeper named Dead-Eye Dick (Max Gillies). Dick spies on a Mexican couple. The husband is very jealous and is about to discover that his wife has a lover when Dick rescues the lover, whose moniker is Mexico Pete (Serge Lazareff). The worldly Pete counsels the shy Dick on his problems approaching women. Dick claims that he's waiting for an Alaskan Eskimo named Nell. Pete and Dick decide to travel to Alaska to find this fantasy woman, and they have several wacky misadventures along the way.
The film begins with an urban couple driving through the countryside in what looks like a cinema advertisement. The scene comes to a halt with a fatal accident. The rural Australian town of Paris arranges fatal accidents to visitors driving through. Townspeople collect items from the luggage of the deceased passengers whilst survivors are taken to the local hospital where they are given lobotomies with power tools and kept as "veggies" for medical experiments by the earnest town surgeon. The young men of the town salvage and modify the wrecked vehicles into a variety of strange-looking cars designed for destruction.
Several people gather at the Homesdale Hunting Lodge including butcher/rock singer Mr Kevin, war veteran Mr Vaughan, an octogenarian Mr Levy. All are tormented by Homesdale's staff and forced to participate in a series of games about death and murder in which the true character of the guests starts to emerge.
Bradley Morahan (James Mason) is an Australian artist who feels he has become jaded by success and life in New York City. He decides that he needs to regain the edge he had as a young artist and returns to Australia.
Queensland sugarcane cutters Roo and Barney spend the off season in Sydney each year, seeing their girlfriends. For sixteen years Roo has spent the summer with barmaid Olive, bringing her a kewpie doll, while Barney romances Nancy. In the seventeenth year, Barney arrives to find that Nancy has married; however Olive has arranged a replacement, manicurist Pearl. Roo has had a bad season, losing his place as head of the cane cutting team to a younger man, Dowd.
In New Guinea, an expedition led by Australian District Officer Steve McAllister heads up the Sepik River to a valley where the adventurer Sharkeye Kelly has discovered oil. The party includes United Nations doctor Louis Dumarcet and crocodile hunter Jeff Clayton.
Chauvel's film uses introductory enacted scenes showing the mutiny, followed by documentary footage, anthropological style, of the mutineers' descendants on Pitcairn Island. Chauvel also used footage of Polynesian women dancers; and film of an underwater shipwreck, filmed with a glass bottomed boat, which he believed was the Bounty but was probably not. This was Chauvel's first 'talkie' and he had clearly at this stage not yet learned to direct actors: the dialogue is very stiff and amateurish. The use of long sections of documentary footage with a voice over, combined with acted scenes, is similar to the hybrid silent and talking pictures that were produced during the transition to sound. It also represents the combination of interests of the director, and he returned to documentary toward the end of his career with the BBC television series Walkabout. Despite the poorly written dialogue, the documentary sections retain their excellence. A return to enactments at the end of the film, with one scripted modern scene in which a child suffers because of the lack of regular ship visits which could have taken the child to hospital, probably sought to make the film a useful voice for the Pitcairn Island community, who had been generous with their participation.
In the midst of the drought and water shortages, the New South Wales State government has unveiled plans to recycle millions of litres of water trapped in a network of abandoned train tunnels beneath the heart of Sydney. However, the government suddenly goes cold on the plan and it does not tell the public why. There is talk of homeless people who use the tunnel as shelter going missing. This, and the silence from the ministers, leads a journalist, Natasha, to begin an investigation into a government cover-up. She and her crew Peter (producer), Steven (Camera operator) and Tangles (Audio engineering) decide to investigate the story and plan to enter the tunnels themselves. After being refused entry to the tunnels by a security guard, they find an alternate entry and make their way inside. They proceed to explore the tunnels and locate various abandoned homeless squats and sections used as air raid shelters in the 1940s.
In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, a dying matriarch, Elizabeth Hunter (Rampling) is attended to by two nurses, a housekeeper and her two adult children (Rush and Davis). Despite her deteriorating health, Elizabeth continues to wield considerable control over her affairs and those around her.
Young surfer Jesse has always been in the shadow of his older brother Victor, who tried to become a champion surfer and failed. Jesse, his friends—Nathan, Andy and Scotty—and his brother Fergus (who has a crush on Andy, which is reciprocated), along with Deb and Leah, all go on a camping-surfing trip to a remote beach, but when Victor shows up tragedy hits. Things get competitive and in a severe accident Andy is seriously injured while Victor is killed. After the funeral, Fergus and Jesse bond on a night under the stars, and the film ends on a happier note, with Jesse as a competitor in a junior surf comp.
Alex Forbes attends a boarding school where his father is principal. A new student, Nigel Colbie, is placed in Alex's room. Nigel has a father who is in the same secret society as Alex's father. Nigel, however, is unusual, and in Alex's words "had this morbid fascination with all things dead." Nigel keeps animals preserved in jars, and dissects them. Alex complains to his father, and Nigel is moved. But Alex can't seem to stop thinking about him. He does, however, start to flirt with a girl named Susan, whom Nigel kills. Later on, Nigel explained that there are a series of things that must happen for them to gain "eternity.