A critical reading of the events of the Canadian Rebellions of 1837 and 1838 and the true story of the banishment of a political prisoner of the Lower Canada Rebellion to the Australian penal colonies. Based in part on the actual Australian 1840-42 prison journal of the exiled François Maurice Lepailleur, the film uses strategies of collage to speak of the crises in the Canadian national identity. And with a Governor-General who has tea with pigs, balances on a circus ball; a revolutionary who literally spits fire; an executioner with a poor memory; and a person of indeterminate sex named Jesus de New York, this film is a uniquely extravagant vision of some crucially important events in the life of 'an improbable and yet ridiculously fortunate country'.