Cirrus@Austlit

The Kendalls are an upright and honest selector family at odds with Major Tarrant, one of the larger station owners in the northern New South Wales district of Karossa Creek. After notable events including a wreck, a drought, a bushfire that burns out the district and a wrongful accusation of cattle-duffing, the Kendalls are cleared and left in possession of their land, while the hostile squatter and the two villains who actually set the fire and faked the duffing charges are all dead.

The son of an honest local magistrate on the north coast of New South Wales becomes the innocent spectator of opium-smuggling in the days when 'there were no breech-loaders in Australia.' A wealth of detail almost suggests personal knowledge of the trade, and the narrator's attitude to the law, represented by a police posse including an Irish trooper who betrays the smugglers, is ambivalent. The smuggling neighbours are sympathetically portrayed, but though they escape overseas, the cost of betrayed trust and lost friendship to the narrator's family is emphasised.

A down-and-out new chum attacked by aborigines en route to the Gilbert River goldfield and left "not right in the head" is befriended by the supercargo of an Island trader in Port Denison (Bowen.) After he helps save his benefactor's life in a savage fight with natives in the Admiralty Islands, his health is restored by a stunning blow on the other side of his head, according to the theory that "like cures like" as propounded by the officiating German doctor.