[3][4] After witnessing the brutalities of Van Diemen's Land, the Roxburghs embark on their return trip to England on the Bristol Maid.

She is rescued by the Aboriginal people of the island, and she later meets Jack Chance, a convict who has escaped from Moreton Bay (now Brisbane), the brutal penal settlement to the south.

It is Chance who escorts her through the dangerous coastal territory south to the outskirts of the settlement, but who refuses to accompany her further and returns to his exile.

She returns to "civilisation" transformed and tormented by her experience with Garnet in Van Diemen's Land, with the Aboriginal people, and with Chance.

The novel sets in sharp relief the distinctions between men and women, whites and blacks, the convicts and the free, and English colonists and Australian settlers.