'Sarah, fourteen, and Joey, eleven, are brother and sister, the children of an Aborigine mother and a Japanese pearl diver. For most of their lives, they have lived at the Melville Island Mission, where they have been Christianised and educated. As the story opens they are being transported by truck far into the interior, where they are to live and work on a station. Beyond Alice Springs the truck is struck by a tornado and completely demolished, the driver killed. Joey knows that they are now in the country of his people, and at his insistence they start out to walk to the hills of the Dreamtime...' (Dust jacket)