When Christina Skov is eight years old she leaves her Danish homeland to sail across the great oceans of the world to Australia. The year is 1871 and the Queensland Government is providing free passage for families willing to take up land and help develop the colony. Life in their new country is hard for the Skov family as they struggle to carve out a farm from what is still mostly wilderness. Christina, however, learns to cope with the hardships and set-backs that come their way, and when, at the age of eighteen, she finds love, she has no hesitation in moving into a rough, isolated cottage in the mountains as the wife of a hard-working farmer.