According to Margare Williams, the plays "belong to two very different studies of the bushranging subject, and the immigrant Melville’s is, surprisingly, the less specific of the two.
It has about as simple a melodramatic plot as it would be possible to find and seems to confirm the author’s description of it in his foreword to the published text as ‘a theatrical piece, introducing a few Colonial characters’.
Richard Fotheringham argues "much of this brief play is conventional in character and plot, but its colonial setting and staging lend even its trite and predictable elements an unexpected interest.
"[8] A party of bushrangers plot an attack on the bush home of a settler, Norwood, who has a daughter Marian.
The settler is saved by his daughter’s lover, Frederick Seymour, previously turned down by the father, and by an Aboriginal, Murrahwa.