A boy and his father travel in their boat, ‘Time Machine’, to a stretch of beach beside a primordial tropical rainforest. As the boy walks among the trees, he imagines the forest as it might have been in the past. Dinosaurs emerge, barely perceptible, from a tangle of trunks and vines; an Aboriginal child is shown playing; the faint outlines of an Aboriginal adult melt into a background of trees and in the final haunting scene, the unspoiled vista readers have toured is overlaid with translucent images of a possible future civilisation.