Morally bankrupt popular historian Patrick Renmark leaves London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he takes a commission to write the biography of his pioneering anthropologist grandfather.
With no enthusiasm and even less integrity, Patrick travels to the former mission town in Australia's far north where his grandfather famously brokered 'peace' between the Indigenous people of the area and the white constabulary.
Of course nothing is as it seems, or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick unwillingly becomes part of local lawyer Jericho Bakerman's quest to return the settlement's ancestral remains to Country.
