Once upon a time the Jae family lived in a tiny drought-stricken desert town that was miles from anywhere in The Outback of Australia in the nineteen fifties. It was a hard-drinking brawling kind of place where the men made up the law and everyone, including the sole policeman, obeyed it. The rules changed constantly. Most people in the town had more fights than feeds especially over the long reign of its conservative Prime Minister, 'Pig Iron' Bob Menzies. The Australian people had been in a constant state of fear since its convict settlement in the seventeen seventies and the self-interested kept them there any which way they could. Along with their parents, Rene and Tom, the Jae family included Henry, Jenny and Baby Girl. They went to the local Catholic school and church but on their way there Jenny and Baby Girl had to protect Henry, and his glasses from the local State school kids. They fought all the way to school and all the way back again. At school, the nuns brutalized the children in their care. Their parents, the police and Father Fourex, the priest who was named after his favourite beer, were too afraid of them to complain. The only escape from the town and the family was at The Mish, an Aboriginal camp of First Nation peoples across the river. There, Uncle Lincoln, a tribal elder, tried to provide Jenny, as well as his own mob, with a sense of safety and sobriety from the grog-induced rage that ran the town. Jenny's matter of fact commentary about their lives provides the backdrop to the comic, tragic and the plain bizarre stories about the people and the town.