Another journey with the Kukadja Aboriginal people into the Great Sandy Desert. The men take Malcolm to the water holes and hunting places where they survived in their younger days as nomads.
The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.
A woman was raped in her school years and broke up with her lover because of it. Later, when she became a high school music teacher, she had forbidden liaisons with her colleagues and students at her apartment.
In 1921 the Kwakiut'l people of Alert Bay, British Columbia, held their last secret potlatch. In 1980 at Alert Bay, the U'mista Cultural Centre (U'mista means "something of great value that has come back") opened its doors to receive and house the cultural treasures which were seized decades earlier and only then returned to the people.