A taboo story of hauntingly brutal awakening for a part native boy with a scheming avaricious white mother determined to hold onto the land she inherited, mistaken in the belief that she can do so by marrying a local Aboriginal man.

Without reckoning on her lonely misfit son Will's wider kinship obligations, she alienates and confuses him until an old man arrives one day to take him on his coming-of-age journey.

Old Will is a magic man, who walks him back through time to meet his ancestors and witness the massacres of his people by encroaching settlers, sealers and marauding pirates around the southwest coast.