Sybylla Melvyn’s earliest memories are not happy: While helping her father, a station agent named Dick, she is bitten by a black snake hiding in the ferns. Her father, in trying to help her, burned her fingers with his pipe. Young Sybylla loves her father. He is jovial, chatty, and happy: “He was my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion” (3). Her mother, on the other hand, worries over Sybylla’s tomboyish ways and her sharp tongue.

When Sybylla is nine, her father decides to move the family to the farming country near ‘Possum Gully. Determined to make a fortune, Dick buys a 1000-acre sheep farm.

Sybylla is distressed because ‘Possum Gully seems very dull: “Nothing ever happened here” (4). The neighbors are friendly but poorly educated. In this backwater culture, Sybylla realizes, girls are expected to marry and have many children.

Her father’s carefree attitude, honesty, and friendliness—qualities that make him happy—are liabilities in the cutthroat livestock business. Dick is too “soft” (6). The farm loses money until Dick, hoping to make a profit selling butter, must secure a ruinous loan from the local Bishop to purchase milking cows. Dick begins to drink, and farm operations slip. Sybylla notices that her father becomes vicious with the farm animals.