Sleeping Giants

Grandfather Macquarie, a missionary, has died, leaving behind 40 hectares and a large farm house. With no relatives or heir the land and house revert to the Local Council. Alderman Tim Quayle decides to hold a competition to see who should be given the land. Two parties apply: Gemma Lacey, an ambitious young Aboriginal girl, supported by the Local DOCS Officer Anne Michaels, and Alan Wallace, a middle aged businessman and farmer with financial difficulties, who is co-erced into the contest by his employee Arthur Moggatt, who has made a crucial discovery on Macquarie’s farm. As the tale unfolds other people become entangled: Penny Warren, Gemma’s half sister, desperate to find a way out; Sarah Wallace, Alan’s wife, discovering for the first time the man she married; and through it all Lloyd Stanley, a local Aboriginal jackeroo, putting things in perspective and desperately trying to keep the peace. What begins as a simple competition for a disused farm suddenly escalates into a struggle for survival as the old and the new, the native and the introduced, the black and the white fight for what they believe is rightly theirs.