Australian drama in which James Mason stars as an artist who returns to his homeland after a long exile in New York. To rediscover his talents, Bradley decides to seek the peace of a run-down shack on a dream island off the Great Barrier Reef, where he meets a young fisher girl named Cora Ryan (Helen Mirren) whom he persuades to model for him. The arrival of an old associate disrupts their island idyll and the problems escalate when the girl's grandmother tries to nip her developing relationship with the worldly painter in the bud.