Set in and around Perth during the 1940s and 1950s, cloudstreet tells the story of two rural families who suffer separate catastrophes and flee to the city to pick up the pieces of their lives and start again. Brought together in the same house at No.1 Cloud Street, the Lambs and the Pickles' share numerous tragedies and triumphs that draw them closer together, until the roof over their heads becomes a home for their hearts.

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.

Click here to view the screening times of Tim Winton's cloudstreet