This blend of documentary and fiction describes the author's search for Daisy Bates, an eccentric woman who lived alone in the deserts of South Australia in the early years of the century and whose accounts of her times there make no distinction between fact and fantasy. As the author explores the ancient and desolate landscape where Mrs Bates found peace and talks to Aborigines and Whites who remember her, she fuses her own imagination with that of her subject, recalling Daisy Bates's life as if it were her own.