How simple it is for bureaucrats, comfy in their Aeron office chairs, to destroy the ambience of a shire! With just a few emails they can green-light paved roads, bridges, noxious waste dumps or destructive mining projects trampling over the environment, traditional owners and locals. When residents are consumed with their own cares - fire, flood, illegal refugees, drought and murder, all of which occur with surprising regularity in a typical Australian outback shire - vested interests can strike a mean blow.
Despite it being referred to as ‘the other side of nowhere’, there is an impressive quality of life here. People are good and kind. Tradition rules. It’s safe. But uninvited, heinous crime sneaks in when an eccentric American woodworker and his art-teacher girl-friend squat in the holiday house of a city family. When these owners come for an unexpected visit, the pair of psychotic squatters decides to fight for possession of the old ruin and the garden that holds the key to a sunny future.

The shire survives the outcome of this catastrophic event just as it has for more than a century. On its coastal fringes, it has been fortunate to become the unwitting host to a shipload of refugees. Their skipper has taken a wrong turn en-route to New Zealand. Any increase in population is appreciated and these skilled Asian migrants are greeted with particular joy for the improvements they bring. Except by one veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

All newcomers and visitors, gay, straight, old, young or foreign are welcome, as long as they love the land and tolerate their neighbors. It is not just the harsh weather and climate that test the locals, but the strangers who drift in and out of its borders.

In a lightning fact-finding tour, the Prime Minister, glad-handing the residents to secure their support, misses the point. His barren wife, Mary, is wooed by delicious and inventive produce but he sees just a potential juicy investment. Public servants are briefed, instructed to alter the boundaries so that the shire’s by-laws can be supplanted with new laws that make the P.M.’s investment viable.

‘The Other Side of Nowhere’ tracks emails between two football-obsessed pen-pushers regarding a massive shire that stretches from the coast to lignum scrub and outback desert beyond. The border reassignment bounces from high priority to back-burner and the outcome ultimately rests on the level of preoccupation amongst its troubled residents.