Elise, a beautiful and artistic, if slightly brittle, city girl is rudely transplanted to the undulating, unforgiving plains of the Mallee when her husband is called home to save the family property. Poor Elise struggles with the rural life: Bill works all day in the back paddock and her father-in-law is openly hostile to his son's unsatisfactory wife. She tries desperately to become part of the community but her meringues don't satisfy the shearers, her spontaneous renditions of opera are thought frankly strange, and the drought kills everything in her garden, save the geraniums she despises. And as their mother withdraws more and more into herself, her spirited, tearaway daughters, Marjorie and Ruby, wild as weeds, are left to raise themselves as best they can. And when their family's fragile peace is finally shattered by Elise's spiralling madness, Marjorie flees to the city leaving her family behind her. And there she stays, leading a very different life, until the boy she loves draws her back to the land she can't forget.
