Across the Sea Wall

When 23-year-old Robert O'Brien meets Latvian refugee Ilsa Kalnins on the boat to Europe he is in flight from the mediocrity of the future that stretches before him in Sydney. Their physical involvement, 'less then love and more than love', for a time completely obsesses him, and he abandons his plans and leaves the boat with her when they dock in India. But although in the daydreams of youth we always meet love with nobility, as he journeys from Australia, to Java, to India and back again to Australia, one man learns with irony his own inescapable limitations.