A woman starts out from a quiet corner of Glebe in Sydney towards the bustle of Broadway and Surry Hills, carrying with her the manuscript of a childhood friend who has recently died. Her thoughts surge between past and present as she strives to understand the effect of her friend's manuscript, Panthers and the Museum of Fire, has had on her. Not only does the manuscript remind her of what she might prefer to forget - youthful ambitions, an abandoned friendship, entanglements with religion and anorexia - it also ignites in her a creative impulse.
In a suburban Sydney pub, a woman tells her younger sister the story of how her life has changed since a serious car accident. She speaks of the blossoming of romance, the rediscovery of her long dormant creativity: her ability to draw. And yet an exhibition comes to nothing, a lover is abandoned. She leaves everything behind. In the driving monologue of her own narrative, the younger sister attempts to make sense of her life and the events and thoughts that have obsessed the elder since the accident.
A woman returns to Australia to clear out her father's house, with an eye to transforming the contents into an art installation in the tradition of the revered Chinese artist Song Dong. What she hasn't reckoned with is the tangle of jealousies, resentments, and familial complicatioins that she had thought, in leaving the country, she had put behind her - a tangle that ensnares her before she arrives.
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