The wet came that year with a cock-eye-bob; loud thunder, ragged streams of lightning and a wind of awful fury ... Now there was nothing in the whole wide river but tossing water, uprooted trees, a few bandicoots and kangaroo rats feebly struggling still, and an old wooden cradle carved with grapes and acanthus leaves in which a dirty brown baby sat drooling with bubbles at his mouth, snatching at the twigs and floating grassheads as he floated onwards, southwards, on the broad tossing breast of the Burdekin. So begins the life of Mo Burdekin, washed ashore into the arms of the riverside storekeeper, Reuben Abraham. Reuben, in all Hebraic honesty, can name the waif nothing but Moses Burdekin. Sarah Campion’s novel evokes the struggling lives of North Queensland in the late nineteenth century. In a fever for gold, Mo moves irrepressibly from one mining site to another. But like his childhood home, Lucy’s Gold, he chases fool’s gold and fails to see the riches around him. Only Lucy Bates can make him open his eyes to see.