In 1939, Kip Westaway, a 14-year-old boy in Melbourne, Australia, rises early in the morning to work for his neighbors, the Hustings. While he takes care of their horse, Charlie, and cleans the stable, Mr. Husting gives Kip a whole shilling, but advises him to keep it a secret between them. Kip’s mother, Jean, heavily favors his twin brother, Francis, over him. This is in part because Kip dropped out of school to earn money for their family after their father died and Jean thinks Kip will never amount to anything. In the afternoon, Kip runs an errand to the butcher shop and on his return home meets Annabel, a pretty girl whom he secretly admires. However, Kip is so nervous that they fail to hit it off. After leaving Annabel, Kip is chased home by a local gang of boys, dirtying his clothes so that he has to leave them in the laundry pile. However, when Kip goes back to the laundry to find his shilling, their boarder, Mrs. Keith, sees him holding her underwear, and she is convinced that Kip is a pervert. Kip’s sister, Connie, springs to his defense, infuriating the Mrs. Keith, who leaves, threatening the Westaways with financial ruin, leading Connie to take a job at the newspaper at which her father used to work.
In 2001, Stanzi Westaway sits listening to a young client named Violet complain about nothing in particular, though they discuss the anxiety that everyone feels after the 9/11 terrorist attack in America. Stanzi is restless in her job and incredibly cynical about the world. Violet notices Stanzi’s father Kip’s shilling sitting on her desk. When Stanzi is packing up to leave for the day, she can’t find the shilling and thinks that Violet stole it. She calls her sister, Charlotte, who is disappointed in Stanzi for losing it and insists he has to find it. Stanzi goes to Violet’s apartment to confront her, only to realize she does not have it. To make matters worse, Violet calls Stanzi fat, deeply hurting her. Stanzi finds the coin back in her office and then goes to speak with her mother, Annabel, talking about her shame and self-contempt, especially because of her weight. She looks at how happy her own parents are and thinks that this curses her and Charlotte, since neither of them will ever be so happy themselves.
In 1940, Jack Husting wakes in his childhood bedroom. He has been away at boarding schools and then working in a remote ranch for the past several years, but he has been home for a visit for six weeks. However, his mother constantly hovers and frets, unsure how to parent a grown man, and there is a notable rift between him and his parents. Through his bedroom window, Jack notices Connie for the first time working in her yard, and he’s entranced by her. Even so, that afternoon Mrs. Husting has another young woman and her mother over, hoping to arrange a relationship between Jack and the young woman. Jack is uninterested though, and as soon as they leave he goes to the Westaways to introduce himself to Connie. While Connie does laundry, the two of them talk and get to know each other, connecting over the fact that neither of them tends to sleep at night. Jack asks his mother about Connie that evening when he gets home, but Mrs. Husting imagines Connie will marry her employer, Mr. Ward, before too long, and tries to dissuade him from thinking of her.
In 1990, Charlotte Westaway feels an odd weight in her stomach while she teaches a morning yoga class. The feeling persists, even as she goes to her second job at a naturopathy store, where she bickers with her boyfriend, Craig, whom she thinks is childish and petty. Charlotte leaves the store early and goes home, where she strips naked and holds an amethyst pendant over her stomach. When it spins counter-clockwise, she takes this as a sign that she’s pregnant. Overwhelmed, Charlotte goes to Stanzi’s house, who buys her a real pregnancy test. The test is positive—Charlotte is pregnant. She is unsure of what to do, since she does not have the money for a baby or a career like Stanzi has, and Craig would obviously be a useless father. Charlotte decides that she wants to talk to her mom, Annabel, even though she knows that means she must face Kip as well, who will likely be disappointed by her irresponsibility. Stanzi drives her to their Uncle Frank’s house, where their parents are, but before they go inside, Stanzi raises the possibility of an abortion, saying there’s no shame in it and millions of women have done it before. Stanzi is unsure, so she uses the rotating amethyst pendant to help her decide to keep the baby.
In 1937, three days after their father died, Francis sneaks into the kitchen, pretending he is a secret spy, and looks at their chair where his father used to sit. As the family eats breakfast the next morning, Jean decides that Connie will drop out of school to work, and she herself will take a job as a housekeeper. Kip asks if he should quit school to work as well, but Jean refuses. However, when Kip goes to school that day, he can’t bring himself to go to his classes and decides he is leaving to go find a job. Immediately after school, Francis joins an older gang of boys—Pike, Mac, and Cray—who want him to come with them and help them rob an old woman’s house while they do some yard work for her. Francis falls in with them and searches her house for valuables, but before he finds more than a few shillings and a pouch that he sticks down his sock, the old woman kicks the boys out, though doesn’t realize she was briefly robbed. The older boys beat up Francis for giving the old woman the few shillings he’d found and leave him behind. After they leave, Francis remembers the pouch in his sock, which he discovers contains an amethyst pendant.
In 1945, Annabel Crouch takes care of her alcoholic, widowed father. They are desperately poor, but they love each other. In the evening, Francis—whom Annabel has been seeing for six months—comes to take her to a dance, and on the way gives her the amethyst pendant as a gift, making up a story about how an old woman gave it to him out of gratitude for charitable work he did for her. They go to the dance and Francis leaves Annabel alone, so she starts dancing with Mac instead. Francis gets upset at this, and Mac nearly fights him until Kip intervenes. Kip and Mac have both recently returned from the war, so they reminisce together until Annabel tells their friends Francis’s story about the pendant’s origin. Mac knows this is a lie, and Francis is so humiliated that he insults Annabel’s poverty. Kip intervenes and buys the pendant from Francis for a huge sum of money so that he can re-gift it to her himself, and leaves the dance with her.
In 1941, Jean Westaway frets about how she will keep her family together and secretly rages against her husband for dying and leaving her a widow with three children. Jean is late for work, but she finds Connie sitting beneath the tree in their yard, holding her stomach. Connie tells Jean that she’s pregnant, and that she’ll never see the father again. Although Connie wants to keep the baby, Jean is furious and decides she must have an abortion, and takes her to a woman who owns a dress shop where Jean herself once had an abortion. She leaves Connie with the woman and goes home for a time, thinking about how everything she is doing is for the sake of her children. She returns to the dress shop to retrieve Connie, who has had the procedure, and leads her home. However, on the way, Connie starts heavily bleeding. Jean leaves her sitting on the street to look for help, though she never finds any, and Connie dies.
In 2006, Alec Westaway briefly runs from home while his mother, Charlotte, is talking to him. Alec despises his family, especially Charlotte because of her veganism and strange rejection of technology. However, when he returns home, though Charlotte is furious, Stanzi—now living with them as their second parent, and now fit and a personal trainer—helps him calm down enough to enjoy his grandparents’ anniversary dinner. Kip, Annabel, and Uncle Frank arrive to commemorate their family and Kip and Annabel’s 50 years of marriage. While Alec is outside fetching Kip’s glasses from the car, he finds a hidden photo of Connie, whom he’s never met, kissing a soldier on a train. He shows the photo to Kip, who is overwhelmed by it and reveals to Stanzi and Charlotte that Connie did not die of the flu, as they’d told the family, but from complications from an abortion. After Kip, Annabel, and Uncle Frank return to their nursing home, Charlotte realizes Kip left the photo behind and begs Alec to take the photo to him, even though it’s already late in the evening. Alec resentfully does so, and on his way sees his friends in a new sports car with pizza and beer. They want Alec to get in so they can go driving and spend the night on the beach drinking. Alec wants to, but feels responsible to Kip, and so ultimately declines even though he thinks this will make him a loser for the rest of his life. After delivering the photo to Kip and Annabel and spending some time with them, Alec returns home. Charlotte is angry at him for taking so long, but hugs him tight, and over her shoulder Kip sees the news on the TV: all his friends in the car died in a drunk driving accident.
In 1941, Connie Westaway sneaks out of the house and meets Jack the night before he leaves for World War II. They talk together for some time until a rainstorm forces them to take shelter in the Hustings’ stable. Jack and Connie have sex in the stable, and Connie feels happy and fulfilled for the first time in her life. The next day, Connie and Kip goes to see Jack off at the train station, and Connie brings a camera along. She sees Jack leaning out of the window and leaves Kip behind to go to him. Another soldier hoists her into the air so she can give him one last kiss, a moment which Kip secretly photographs. The train rolls away and Jack is gone. Even though she knows she may never see Jack again, Connie feels grateful for everything in her life.
