On holiday at her uncle's farm in New Zealand, Gretchen befriends Ronny, a Māori boy with a troubled city past, and Bevis, the birdwatching son of a loathed developer.

In the story, twelve-year-old Gretchen has a passion for science and a talent for all things mechanical, which is why the strange old brass "weathervane" (referred to as the "daisy rod") on her uncle's farm fascinates her.

But the brass daisy rod has a complex and terrifying significance, and Gretchen and her new friend Ronny discover its links with the far distant Sirius, the Dog Star.

For a long time, Children of the Dog Star remained unavailable due to complex copyright issues, but TVNZ released the series on DVD[1] (as of 3 July 2009), and syndicated the show to certain North American PBS stations.

The series was also broadcast in Czechoslovakia, Malaysia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, Poland, Canada, Greece and the United Kingdom during the mid and late 1980s.