'Dick Gordon and Jack Meredith, 18 years old and newly arrived in Australia, explore the opal fields from Victoria to the border between south-west Queensland and north-eastern SA. The boys spend all day cycling to the opal fields of White Cliffs in outback heat, without a trace of sunburn or heat exhaustion. Macdonald includes the complete verses of '"Waltzing Matilda", sightings of bunyips, a grand corroboree, and a voyage down the Darling which borders on the burlesque' (
Oxford Companion to Australian Children's Literature 271).