In 1836,the barque Stirling Castle was wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef and the crew and the captain's wife, Mrs Fraser, were cast ashore on the coast of what is now Queensland. Captured by aborigines with cannibalistic tendencies, Captain Fraser and his wife were stripped naked and driven into the bush. Fraser was then murdered and his wife, a lady of genteel upbringing, was tortured and made to perform humiliating tasks as the slave of the tribe. Having given birth in an open boat, her baby was immediately drowned and she was forced instead to mother an aboriginal child 'one of the most deformed and ugly looking brats my eyes ever beheld'. A remarkable rescue by an Irish convict, posing as a 'ghost' of a dead warrior, saved Mrs Fraser whose subsequent misadventures in England provide an intriguing finale to this extraordinary story.