'It would be unbearable to think this story should lie untold. Drawn from her mother’s personal memoir and her own memories and archives, Houen writes about their hardworking passionate lives in a Godforsaken but picturesque patch of marginal land on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in Hay, NSW. Water shortage then was a family battle and now it is a national and global one, with foreign water ownership in the Murray-Darling basin at 20.9% (Chan 2019).' (Introduction)