It was the eleventh in the Great South Land Saga of novels.

E. V. Timms died in 1960, before the novel was finished so his wife Alma completed it.

She had helped research and plot all the novels in the saga so the task was relatively easy.

"[4] In the 1870s, beyond in Darling River, a half-caste girl, Jenny Courage, searches for her father, George Crumby, who abandoned her and her mother.

Jenny works on a river board and becomes a housekeeper on an isolated station owned by Martha and Henry Gubby.