A documentary about the threat posed to New Zealand's Kaipara Harbour by rapacious commercial fishing and development.

Barry Barclay was a New Zealand/Aotearoa director of documentaries and feature films. He is regarded as one of the world's first, and very influential, Indigenous film makers. The film The Camera on The Shore is a feature length introduction to Barry, and to his film making.

Colin is the deputy principal of a city high school (Avondale College, Auckland) who reluctantly applies for the principal's job on the latter's retirement. Colin's wife, Elizabeth - who is losing interest in him -gives a dinner party. Among the guests is Judy, temporarily reconciled with her husband for the sake of the children. Colin - who has taken upon jogging to combat a spreading waistline - and Judy, gradually enter into an affair.

John Middleton Murry visits France to finalize the publication of a collection of his late wife, Katherine Mansfield's, letters and journals. The publisher's girlfriend Marie (who physically resembles Mansfield) and Murry become friends. Marie gradually learns that Murry not only profited greatly from his publication of Mansfield's writings, but that as her editor he sacrificed the real Mansfield to his own romantic dream, and even that he published her letters and journals against her expressed wishes.