It centres on two white schoolchildren who are left to fend for themselves in the Australian Outback and who come across a teenage Aboriginal boy who helps them to survive.

The boy believes it to be a game, but the daughter realises her father is attempting to murder them, and flees with her brother, seeking shelter behind rocks.

The girl conceals the suicide from her brother, retrieves some of the picnic food, and leads him away from the scene, attempting to walk home through the desert.

Discovering an oasis with a small water hole and a fruit tree, they spend the day playing, bathing, and resting.

He does not speak English, much to the girl's frustration, but her brother mimes their need for water and the newcomer cheerfully shows them how to draw it from the drying bed of the oasis.

He returns to the farmhouse, catching the undressing girl by surprise, and initiates a courtship ritual, performing a dance in front of her.

Hiking up the road, the siblings find a nearly-deserted mining town where a surly employee directs them towards nearby accommodation.

While he embraces her and relates office gossip, she either imagines or remembers a time in which she, her brother, and the Aboriginal boy are playing and swimming naked in a billabong in the Outback.

Roeg described the film in 1998 as "a simple story about life and being alive, not covered with sophistry but addressing the most basic human themes; birth, death, mutability".

Many writers have also drawn a direct parallel between the depiction of the Outback and the Garden of Eden, with Nowra observing that this went as far as to include "portents of a snake slithering across the bare branches of the tree" above Agutter's character as she sleeps.

[9] Gregory Stephens, an associate professor of English, sees the film framed as a typical "back to Eden" story, including common motifs from 1960s counterculture; he offers the skinny-dipping sequence as an example of a "symbolic shedding of the clothes of the over-civilized world".

She considers the ages of the two adolescents, who are on the cusp of adulthood and losing their childhood innocence, as a metaphor for the irreversible change wrought by Western civilisation.

Roeg approached the English playwright Edward Bond about writing the script, who handed in fourteen pages of handwritten notes.

[12] Roeg then obtained backing from two American businessmen, Max Raab and Si Litvinoff,[13] who incorporated a company in Australia and sold the distribution rights to 20th Century Fox.

"[15] The film is an example of Roeg's well-defined directorial style, characterised by strong visual composition from his experience as a cinematographer, combined with extensive cross-cutting and the juxtaposition of events, location, or environments to build his themes.

However, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the age threshold to eighteen which meant the BBFC was required to consider the scenes of nudity in the context of the new law when the film was re-submitted in 2011.

"[22] Film critic Edward Guthmann also notes the strong use of exotic natural images, calling them a "chorus of lizards".