'Deals with a group of long-lost Scottish adventurers whose self-contained community, Columba, has been isolated from the wider world in a remote valley since 1745, allowing them to develop a radically alternative society [...] The chief distinguishing feature of Columba is its fostering of the practice of handfasting, a custom allowing trial marriages of a year and a day.'
Source: Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction.
Ringwood : Penguin , 1984 pg. vii-ix