Mike, a surfer from
Penong, South Australia, receives from his dying mother a letter, written 25 years earlier, instructing him to meet its author at a spot west of the small town of Dingo on a certain date in 1989. The writer turns out to be an oddball alien in a time-travelling spaceship disguised as a roadside diner, "Joe Bogart's", dating from
Manhattan Project-era
Los Alamos, New Mexico. On the way he encounters Ryder, once a famous cricketer but now a small-town policeman, on the trail of a murderous motorcyclist and his sidecar-riding sidekick — accomplices of Weston, a land-grabbing weather watcher who believes the desert is about to become valuable pasture, and who develops a temporary alliance with McCauley, a UFO hunter who will stop at nothing in his quest for fame and fortune. It is the surfer's pre-ordained purpose to recover the spaceship's power module, which had been lost overboard, but is frustrated in his quest by Cheryl, a ditzy fellow-hitchhiker, who fancies it as a hat (it is disguised as a "King Beer" emblem) and the UFO hunter, who believes he can discover something by prising it open. He is assisted by his love interest Connie, a beautiful
Mini-moke-driving farmer. Other characters include a weathered old bone collector, who hauls his "finds" in an ancient hand-cart, and Dingo's town storekeeper, involved in a never-ending fight against dust in his shop. ==Cast==