A body has been found in the burned-out wreckage of the church at Gibber's Creek - with older skeletons lying beneath it. The corpse is identified as that of Ignatius Mervyn, the man who attempted to kill Jed Kelly and her unborn child. Newcomer Fish Johnstone is drawn into the murder investigation, convinced that the local police are on the wrong track with their enquiries. But as she digs beneath the warm and welcoming surface of the Gibber's Creek community, more secrets emerge.

It's 1972 in Gibber's Creek, and across the nation, the catchcry is "It's time". As political ideals drift from disaster to the dismissal, it's also time for Jed Kelly to choose between past love, Nicholas, the local Labor member, and Sam from the Halfway to Eternity commune. It's time, too, for Matilda Thompson to face her ghosts and the life that took a young girl from the slums of Grinder's Alley to being the formidable matriarch of Gibber's Creek. During this period of extraordinary social change and idealism, modern Australia would be born. 

Jed Kelly has finally persuaded her great-aunt Nancy to tell the story of her grandparents. The tale that unfolds is one of Australia's greatest romances - that of Clancy of the Overflow, who gave up everything for Rose, the woman he adored, and yet still gained all he'd lost and more. But Nancy's story is not the history that Jed expects. More tales lurk behind the folklore that surrounds Clancy - the stories of the women hidden in Australia's long history who forged a nation and whose voices need to be heard.

Hippies wear beads, demonstrators march against the Vietnam War, and the world waits to see the first human steps on the moon's surface. But at Gibbers Creek, Jed Kelly sees ghosts, from the past and future, at the Drinkwater billabong where long ago the swaggie leaped to his defiant death. But is 17-year-old Jed a con artist or a survivor? When she turns up at Drinkwater Station claiming to be the great-granddaughter of Matilda Thompson's dying husband, Jed clearly has secrets. As does a veteran called Nicholas, who was badly wounded in the Vietnam War.

The year is 1942 and the world is at war. Nancy Clancy left school at 14 to spend a year droving, just like her grandfather Clancy of the Overflow. Now 16, Nancy's family has sent her to Malaya to bring home her sister-in-law Moira and baby nephew Gavin. Yet despite the threat of Japanese invasion, Moira resists, wanting to stay near her husband Ben. But not even Nancy of the Overflow can stop the fall of Singapore and the capture of so many Australian troops. When their ship is bombed, Nancy, Moira and Gavin are reported missing. 

The soldiers she saved called her the Angel of Waterloo. The husband she loved and lost called her Hen. The patients she treated in secret called her Auntie Love. She was Henrietta Bartlett, a surgeon's daughter, a survivor of the Napoleonic Wars. But now the battlefield is just a blood-soaked memory, and Hen dreams of peace, a home, and a society that allows women to practise medicine. On the other side of the world, the newly founded colony of New South Wales seems a paradise. But Europe's wars cast long shadows....

The year is 1919. Thirty years have passed since the man from Snowy River made his famous ride. But World War I still casts its shadow across a valley in the heart of Australia, particularly for orphaned 16-year-old Flinty McAlpine, who lost a brother when the Snowy River men marched away to war. Why has the man Flinty loves returned from the war so changed and distant? Why has her brother Andy "gone with cattle", leaving Flinty in charge of their younger brother and sister and with the threat of eviction from the farm she loves so dearly?

In 1894, 12-year-old Matilda flees the city slums to find her unknown father and his farm. But drought grips the land, and the shearers are on strike. Her father has turned swaggie, and he's wanted by the troopers. In front of his terrified daughter, he makes a stand against them, defiant to the last. "You'll never catch me alive," said he....

It's 1939, and for Georg, son of an English academic living in Germany, life is full of cream cakes and loving parents. It is also a time when his teacher measures the pupils' heads to see which of them have the most 'Aryan'- shaped heads. But when a university graduation ceremony turns into a pro-Nazi demonstration, Georg is smuggled out of Germany to war-torn London and then across enemy seas to Australia where he must forget his past and who he is in order to survive. Hatred is contagious, but Georg finds that kindness can be, too.

The bombs were falling and the smoke rising from the concentration camps, but all Hitler's daughter knew was the world of lessons with Fraulein Gelber and the hedgehogs she rescued from the cold. Was it just a story or did Hitler's daughter really exist? And If you were Hitler's daughter, would all the horror that occurred be your fault, too? Do things that happened a long time ago still matter?