Cloudstreet

In southern Western Australia in 1943, the Lamb family rescues their son, Fish, from nearly drowning, but their faith in God's ability to grant them a miracle is destroyed when they realise Fish has been left brain damaged - albeit with a perpetual desire to be reunited with the water he has been dragged from.
He does not recognise Oriel, his mother, and he's a laughing stock in town. Oriel responds by putting God in his place, turning her back on her faith and her community and establishing a new home where they can all knuckle down and work to make a decent living. Where to go is left to chance - a spinning knife - and the destination chosen by the piece of cutlery is Perth.
Meanwhile, out on the phosphate-rich Abrolhos Islands, Sam Pickles thinks the shifty shadow of bad luck has fallen on him and if he gets up, something bad will happen. But the foreman makes him get up, and sure enough he promptly loses the fingers off his right hand in a boating accident. He is flown back to Geraldton where his wife Dolly works in his brother's pub. It looks like their bad luck will never end - until Sam's brother dies of a heart attack and leaves him two hundred quid and a boarded-up, ramshackle home in No.1 Cloud Street, Perth. Thinking his luck's changed, he takes the two hundred quid to the track and loses the lot, so now his only asset is the groaning, empty house. He splits it in half and decides to live in one half with his family, and rent out the other half. The Lamb family, recent arrivals in Perth, see the ad and rent out the other half. Thus two families, strangers to each other, end up sharing the one house.
The Lambs open a corner store in the front room of their half of the house, with Oriel giving most of the orders and her husband Lester doing most of the work. But they are industrious. They make their own life, whereas the Pickles are blown by the winds of fate. Sam gets a job in the Mint, while Dolly, regretting the roads not travelled, spends more and more time in the bar. Increasingly, the domestic chores at home fall to their smart, well-read young daughter, Rose, who grows to hate her mother and their meagre existence.
But the house - the living, groaning house - is an uncomfortable presence both families feel. And it is also felt by one of the local river people, Bob Crab, whose indigenous heritage allows him to be sensitive to the present and the 'everywhen'. Oddly, Fish Lamb's accident has left him with the same sensitivity, and they both seem to know that the sufferings of the past - sufferings still trapped within the house - will need an end to division and exclusion before they can relax into a timeless peace.
On the river, Fish briefly introduces Quick to the magic of the undivided world as he (Fish) sometimes perceives it, but by the time Lester finds them and they return home, the divisions and sufferings in the house have driven Oriel out, and she takes up residence in a tent in the backyard.

Years have passed, but little has changed. The Lambs are still bustlers, the Pickles do little. Rose's antipathy towards Dolly has grown - particularly when Dolly tells her she has to leave school and get a job. Rose's brother, cheeky little Ted (Dolly's favourite) is now a jockey and a hit with the girls. And Quick Lamb is still looking after his brain-damaged brother Fish, and continuing to feel a sense of guilt over the prawning accident in which Fish nearly drowned. Soon, the pressure of those feelings leads him to snap and he walks out of No.1 Cloud Street.
In response to Quick's desertion, to keep herself busy, Oriel declares war on a competing local cornershop, unaware that its owner, Gerry Clay, is having an affair with Dolly Pickles. Oriel wins the retail war but is shaken into realising the cost of the war has led Gerry to walk out on his wife, who is now left to bring up their kids on her own and who therefore hates Oriel Lamb. Mrs Clay also tells Sam Pickles about Dolly's affair. Sam contemplates ending it all, but Rose stops him. Instead, in typical Pickles fashion, he does nothing, and things sort themselves out when Gerry Clay leaves. Then Ted elopes to Adelaide with the daughter of the horse trainer he works for, and suddenly Dolly's favourite son is gone. Meanwhile, Rose, keen for an escape from the stifling nothingness of No.1 Cloud Street, begins a relationship with an urbane, young would-be-author, Toby Raven, who represents all the things she doesn't like about cloudstreet. She soon makes the disturbing discovery that he is a plagiarist. Toby does a decent job of explaining to her that it wasn't really plagiarism - but we can see Rose's trust in him has been damaged.
Before things can settle down, Sam arrives home with a black eye and a broken tooth, and Dolly knows he once again owes a lot of money from betting at the track. Lester, keen to avoid any debt collectors arriving on the doorstep of a house he shares, quickly hides Sam in a remote shack and sets about skimming the money Sam owes from the shop's profits. Caught by Dolly, she seduces him, partly in thanks, partly to buy his silence.
Quick, meanwhile, is roo-shooting in the vast wheat fields of Western Australia. When he's left injured by a charging kangaroo one night, his connection with Fish leads to another moment of magic realism - Fish, on both the backyard porch but also ""in"" the wheat field, offers to rescue the prone Quick, but he is unable to, as Quick had been unable to help the young, drowning Fish.
Lester brings out the money Sam owes to the shack where Sam is hiding, but Lester is extremely concerned that Oriel will know he's stolen from the shop, and that Sam might twig he's just had a tryst with Dolly. But Sam has just tossed a coin and come up with one hundred and thirty three ""heads"" in a row. He is on fire. His luck is in. They can take the money Lester has brought out to the two-up school and triple it and everything'll be sweet. In the maelstrom of life, it's an ""up"" moment, a winning moment they can all feel.

Winning moments never last, however, and news arrives from Adelaide that Ted has died of a heart attack in a sauna while trying to lose weight (as jockeys do). Dolly is inconsolable, although she makes renewed attempts to see if alcohol will console her. Rose makes a token effort to comfort her mother, but her fundamental contempt for Dolly makes this impossible. The house is still groaning and suffering - worse than ever. Life is now as divided and dislocated as it will ever be. Rose is, emotionally, as far from her mother and her family as she will ever be. Quick is physically as far from Fish and his family as he will ever be. Oriel is furthest away from the faith she once had. And Sam, as always, is just waiting to see what happens next.
Quick's truck just misses crashing into a freight train. That's what happens next. While recovering, extraordinary events take place that seem partly organised by Bob Crab to ensure that Quick returns to No.1 Cloud Street, with the knowledge that losing his family is worse than losing his mind. After returning, Quick sees Oriel and resolves his feelings of guilt regarding Fish. He begins fishing on the Swan River with Fish, allowing his brother to be one step closer to his beloved water. Meanwhile Toby Raven unwittingly prods Rose into realising how much the simple, loving life of No.1 Cloud Street is more in her soul than the artificial world of Toby - they break up, and Rose and Quick see the end to each of their searches in each other. Before too long, Rose is pregnant, and an engagement is declared. Dolly thinks this is hugely ironic, but with Rose about to be a mother herself, truths and shames of the past are finally faced that dissolve the hatred between mother and daughter.
It's now mid 1950s, and for a moment Sam tosses up whether to sell No.1 Cloud Street - but the very idea makes everyone realise they actually don't want to. The house has become part of them. Part of all of them.
After Rose and Quick's wedding, their son is born in the house, and Oriel praises the Lord, returning to faith as she sees life itself is the miracle and the miracle was surrounding her all the time. Two families divided within each other and between each other for so long are now in harmony, and Bob Crab knows he can at last finish the business of releasing the house itself from its sufferings and the injustices of 'everywhen'. The business is finished.
And Fish can now at last once again recognise Oriel. He can see it all. And the only journey still to complete is his own long journey back to the beautiful, beautiful water.