Sydney, 1948. Brilliant German surgeon, Hugo Winter, is dead, and his protégé, Lucy Brynne, is tasked with sorting his papers. Among them, Lucy finds glimpses of Hugo’s past that paint a disturbing picture of war and prejudice - a portrait of Australia she can barely recognise. That same week, an intriguing patient comes into her care on the orthopaedic ward at Sydney Hospital: one Mr Jim Cleary. Lucy’s experience as an army physiotherapist, as well as her own very personal knowledge of pain, tell her there’s more to this man’s fractured leg than meets the eye. 

It’s 1868, and the gold rush is spreading across the wild west of New South Wales, bringing with it a new breed of colonial rogue - bushrangers. A world far removed from hardworking farm girl Annie Bird and her sleepy village on the outskirts of Sydney. But when a cruel stroke of fortune sees Annie orphaned and outcast, she is forced to head for the goldfields in search of her grandfather, a legendary tracker. Determined and dangerously naive, she sets off with little but a swag full of hope - and is promptly robbed of it on the road.

A tale of longing, loss and growing love under the bright Australian sun. It's 1921, and the Great War has left in its wake untold tragedy, not only in lives lost but in the guilt of survivors, the deep-set scars of old wounds and the sting of redoubled bigotries. In the tiny hamlet of Sunshine, on the far-flung desert's edge, three very different ex-servicemen - Jack Bell, an Aboriginal horseman; Snow McGlynn, a laconic, curmudgeonly farmer and Art Lovelee, an eccentric engineer - find themselves sharing a finger of farmland along the Darling River, and not much else. 

The whole of the harbour was touched with gold - the tops of the quiet waves, warehouse roofs, the bulging folds of sails at rest, the tips of seagull wings - giving him one sweeping glimpse of beauty just as he was leaving, a vision of things as they ought always to be just as they were not.... March, 1912. A sultry Indian summer hangs over the west coast of Australia and aboard the luxury steamship SS Koombana, three tales entwine.

It's November 1939, another war in Europe. And Bernie Cooper is wondering what's ahead for her. She knows Gordon Brock is going to ask her to marry him – any second now. An honest country boy about to graduate from university as a geologist, he's a good catch by anyone's standards, too. And she's going to say no. The harsh realities of this Second World War have other plans for Bernie, though, and once her adored father is commissioned to serve again, she accepts Gordon's proposal - mostly to please her dad.