Eddie West, orphaned when his parents are drowned in a flood, grows up in poverty on the outskirts of a small town in western New South Wales. But Eddie is shrewd, ambitious and enterprising; he takes a job with a shifty skin-buyer and sets out undaunted to become a successful business-man. His fortunes are important to his adopted family - the patient mother, the spendthrift son, and the daughter whose rival suitors are the proprietor of a buckjumping show and a police trooper who takes an uncomfortably close interest in illegal skin-buying. The action moves between the sleeepy, dusty town, with its apparent monotony hiding human currents that at times break the surface with explosive force, and the Lonely Jackeroo, a little pub out on the vast plains, whose proprietor has an attractive daughter and a vital interest in the success of Eddie's career. (Publisher's blurb).
