The lives of the Nyari people are completely disrupted when two convicts are washed up on the beach of their tribal lands.

Maydina and Biri escape from the seal hunters who enslaved them. Their intent is to escape back to their traditional lands, but they quickly learn that these lands have been settled and their people have now scattered.

Nerida is a young, educated indigenous woman who returns to the government mission where her family lives, after spending several years in the city. She is shocked by the conditions and attempts to motivate her people to improve them.

Ann Cutler is the 18-year-old adopted daughter of middle-class parents in an Australian country town. She has been told that she is French-Polynesian and that there is no record of her birth parents beyond knowledge of their nationality. The truth is that she is born of her adoptive father, Doug Cutler, and an Aboriginal woman called Alice Wilson, who lives locally.