This novel charts the misfortune of Richard Devine, falsely accused of murder, through the worst Australian penal settlements, the notorious Macquarie Harbour, Port Arthur, and Norfolk Island, retaining his humanity and spiritual dignity through all the degradations that cruelty and inhumanity could devise This is a story of murder, mutiny, flogging, child-suicide, homosexual rape, and cannibalism yet it is also a powerful story of moral courage and heroic resistance to dehumanisation