Birds of Passage is the powerful and haunting story of Seamus O'Young, an Australina-born Chinese, on a collision course with the past.

He reconstructs his past through the eyes of Shan, an ancestor who came to Australia in the 1880s. And, just as Shan was driven from the goldfields by depravity, racism and sheer greed; so Seamus finds himself, a century later, fighting for his own life and sanity.