Based on Jack Hibberd's popular comedic play and set in the small rural Victorian township of Dimboola, the story takes place in the three days leading up to the marriage of locals Maureen Delaney and Morrie McAdam. Although the film adaptation contains much that is in the original play, it also allows the narrative to move beyond the confines of the single stage setting. Framed around a visiting English journalist who has arrived in the town to study the ways of the 'natives,' the story offers up a variety of images and situations that allow the apparently dim-witted Aussies blokes to do typically ratbag and oddball things with and to each other, usually while knocking back another 'tinnie' or trying to crack onto a sheila.
The dramatic action sees, for example, Morrie undergo the rigours of the shearing-shed bucks party. Amid the booze, obscenities, and fist fights arrives Angelique, a stripper who'll do more than just strip--if the price is right! Complications arise when Dangles, the best man, delivers incriminating photographs of Morrie and Angelique to Maureen, and the mayhem worsens when Morrie's mother reveals that the future bride and groom could actually be first cousins because of a pre-marital fling!
