'We've decided for our Moomba performance we should only do songs we know.' 'As the band's musical director I would like to say I agree with you completely.'

A few songs into our Moomba set all was going well, then five songs in a row Terry felt an irresistible urge to play. Five songs none of us, Terry included, appeared to know. It took just shy of twelve hours for us to travel the first quarter of a mile that separates Reservoir from our destination of Cunnamulla. If we maintained that rate, it wouldn't even take a full nine years to get there. Such was the life of a 'Hi-Spender'. Welcome to the world everyman whitefella Johnny finds himself in as he struggles with the chaos of being a member of indigenous band 'Stoney Broke and the Hi-Spenders', a chaos matched by the tenuous state of his inner life.

Australia in the '80s was a nation barely free from the shackles of its stultifying White Australia Policy. You were more likely to see a kangaroo bounding down a Melbourne street than you would an Aborigine. Stoney Broke and the Hi-Spenders is the story of descendants of Aborigines who slipped in thousands of years before the White Australia Policy became law, and one whitefella whose ancestors arrived many years later.