A hitch-hiker rides a cattle-truck with a drunk, abandoning him in the dark. After a night of pain and delirium he wakes among people completely alien to him, speaking a language he doesn't understand. Desperate to find his way back he is attacked and wounded, then rescued by those whom he fled: a woman who wakes in him a longing for what cannot be regained, an old man struggling to save his niece, a brother who is no brother fighting to recover his wife and child, an orphan betrayed and broken in an alien world. With these he embarks on a journey that astounds and horrifies him, and which precipitates him at last into the roots of our entanglement with alcohol and drugs. Set in 1980s Victoria and in southern Poland seven thousand years ago, Wayward Child chronicles the impact on people with a hunting and gathering economy of changes brought by people with an agricultural economy.