Matthew Walker travels to a small country town to restart his life after being a conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War. He is looking for somewhere to belong and for peace-of-mind. He quickly learns that being an outsider makes this more difficult than expected. He drifts into the orbit of other outsiders, including fellow musicians. They form a pub band, The Cutters. It becomes an identity, an antidote to ostracism and with a little help from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky a road, just maybe, to redemption... and love.
The Cutters is a life-change story, backdropped by the harshness and social inequities of rural life at the start of the collapse of Australia's wool industry in the 1970s. Slipping into history with this cultural and economic juggernaut was a sizeable part of the national identity, and for many small country towns, security.
For young people, especially in rural society, daring to challenge authority, daring to break from long-established social hierarchies and convention, made it a time of uncertainty, fear, wry humour and grim pathos. Change was happening and change can be exciting, liberating, confusing and tragic in equal measure.
This I observed, quietly, not fully understanding the currents of influence around me, when I worked for a year on a small town newspaper in the Great Southern region of Western Australia in the mid-1970s (a little later than the period in which The Cutters is set). I also house-shared with a journalist, just a few years older than me, deeply disturbed by his experience as a conscript in the Vietnam War ... or what the Vietnamese more correctly call, The American War. If anyone is interested in the truth about that conflict I encourage reading Christopher Hitchens's book, 'The Trial of Henry Kissinger'.
For me, that period was all part of the foundation being laid for a life ahead and this is what the central character, Matthew Walker, is achieving, or hopes he is achieving. It might take a sequel for him to fully realise... .