Wake in Fright

“Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There's nothing else out here.”

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a young schoolteacher posted to a remote outback school, counting the days until the holidays take him home to Sydney. Stopping overnight in a rough mining town, he falls in with a crowd of drinkers, among them the disgraced doctor Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence). Ted Kotcheff lets the town's hospitality close around Grant, and the two men's pull on each other is the thing that keeps him from leaving.