The brother and sister are dying of thirst, camped by a spring that has dried up while they were asleep. The boy (Lucien John) sees a figure on the horizon.

The sequence is partly about language, and the inadequacy of words as a tool of communication.

After a drunken night at a pub in Broken Hill, the three drag artists – Mitzi (Hugo Weaving), Felicia (Guy Pearce) and Bernadette (Terence Stamp) – awake to find their bus defaced with a homophobic

In the outback, the father (John Meillon) reads his maps and geological tables as his daughter (Jenny Agutter) prepares a picnic.

The man (Syd Brisbane) and the woman (Ulli Birvé) arrive in the desert outside Las Vegas, because he has always wanted to go there. She does not, so she waits overnight while he tries his luck.

An old lady (Alethea McGrath) tells her two granddaughters (Chloe and Phoebe Ferguson) a story that a man once told her.

Yuma (Cassandra Glenn) and Kyanna (Christine Glenn) are desperate to return to their own lives.

Mr Tachibana (Gotaro Tsunashima) waits outside the Port Hedland airport. Sandy Edwards (Toni Collette) arrives late, and with no idea of the proper way to greet a visitor from Japan.

Bogged and stranded a long way from help, Sandy (Toni Collette) asks Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima) if she can borrow his phone, because she has no signal.

Sandy (Toni Collette) touches Hiromitsu’s face as he’s sleeping. They are in bed together. In the morning, at a petrol station, she sees a picture of his family in his wallet.