A young girl who has just spent an afternoon playing tennis and making love with a man, gets accidentally run off the road by a truck. Ending up on a dead-end dirt road, her car gets stuck in a ditch, where she starts getting terrorized by a drooling, gibbering psycho, who also has a colony of rats.

The harsh, competitive world of Australian sheep-shearers provides the setting for this powerful film. Foley and 'Black Arthur' do battle for the position of 'top shearer' amid the boozy world of men isolated from civilisation. After weeks of work they are confronted with non-union labour undercutting them - a situation which leads to a violent conclusion.