He attempts to reconnect with an old flame, Marge, and move to Queensland together.
John Ruane says he was inspired by a newspaper article about a slaughterman who killed his de facto wife and then got drunk for two days.
He decided to remove the killing aspect, concentrate on the relationship.
Ruane: What we were trying to do then, strangely enough, was trying to imitate Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in reverse and to imitate Midnight Cowboy, a sort of Northcote version of Midnight Cowboy - not the story, but the fact that they were headed for a dream.
This article related to an Australian film of the 1970s is a stub.