3 ideas
In 1943 Sam Pickles, a gambler who has lost fingers in a winch accident, inherits a huge decaying house in Perth. Unable to afford it, he rents half to the Lambs, a devout family who open a shop downstairs after their son Fish nearly drowns and is left brain-damaged. Over twenty years the two clashing households slowly fuse, ending with Quick Lamb married to Rose Pickles and Fish finally walking back into the river at a shared family picnic.
Sam Pickles lives by chance, believing fortune is a 'shifty shadow of God' that simply falls on people, so he gambles and waits. Oriel Lamb treats relentless work and discipline as the only defence against catastrophe. Seeing each household's economic behaviour as a theology of how fate works explains why neighbours facing the same conditions make opposite choices about money, risk and effort.
Before the families arrive, the house was a mission home where Aboriginal girls were confined, and one of them died there. Its hauntings suggest that this earlier history lingers as a pressure on the people who live there later. The ghosts are finally released at Wax Harry's birth, though the families never explicitly recognise the historical wrong.