Narrator Bettina Whitelaw, now nearing eighty, lives in England and belongs to the literary establishment but was brought up in Bundaroo, a small town in the Australian outback. At sixteen, Bettina won a prize in a competition sponsored by the Bulletin, managed to escape from Bundaroo and began a literary career which ultimately took her to Europe. Sixty years later, she begins to write her memoirs. As painful and disturbing images from her childhood begin to re-surface, other elements from her past in the hot, dusty outback town combine to put her in serious danger.
