Father Beitz has a dream. From his home in 1870s Hamburg, he plans to pioneer an idyllic German community in faraway Australia, in a backwoods hamlet, barely settled, called Bundaberg.
He soon finds other dreamers eager to join him, thrilled by the prospect of a sunny clime, cheap arable land, and their own Lutheran society. Among them are the wealthy merchant Hubert Hoepper, the farmer Jakob Meissner and his family, and a woman named Eva Zimmerman, determined to see her children educated.
But when they arrive they find the land, bought for them by Father Beitz, is nothing but jungle, and before long it seems the trials of the new home may force the community to disintegrate. As time passes, a combination of courage and determination carries the pioneers beyond their fears, but a new threat awaits. A murderer has begun his journey from Hamburg in the guise of a curate requested by Father Beitz and is set on destroying the emigrants's utopia for his own ends. Only an elderly Aborigine mystic sees the evil that threatens them, but can he warn them in time?
