As Time Goes By (originally titled The Cricketer) is a 1988 Australian science fiction comedy film directed by Barry Peak and starring Max Gillies, Bruno Lawrence, and Nique Needles.

[2] Mike, a surfer from Penong, South Australia, receives from his dying mother a letter, written 25 years earlier, instructing him to meet its author at a spot 50 miles (80 km) west of the small town of Dingo on a certain date in 1989.

On the way he encounters Ryder, once a famous cricketer but now a small-town policeman, on the trail of a murderous motorcyclist and his sidecar-riding sidekick — accomplices of Weston, a land-grabbing weather watcher who believes the desert is about to become valuable pasture, and who develops a temporary alliance with McCauley, a UFO hunter who will stop at nothing in his quest for fame and fortune.

It is the surfer's pre-ordained purpose to recover the spaceship's power module, which had been lost overboard, but is frustrated in his quest by Cheryl, a ditzy fellow-hitchhiker, who fancies it as a hat (it is disguised as a "King Beer" emblem) and the UFO hunter, who believes he can discover something by prising it open.

Other characters include a weathered old bone collector, who hauls his "finds" in an ancient hand-cart, and Dingo's town storekeeper, involved in a never-ending fight against dust in his shop.