Marie La Varre

Wallaby Station in the outback is devastated by drought. The sheep are starving, but Jo Galloway (Charles Beetham) and his wife (Nan Taylor) battle on. Their son Gilbert (Rawdon Blandford) falls in with the wrong crowd while studying medicine in Sydney: conman Varsy Lyddleton (John Faulkner) and the seductress Olive Lorette (Marie La Varre). Gilbert forges his mother’s cheques to pay for Olive’s favours, ruining the family. A bank takes ‘friendly possession’ of Wallaby Station. Gilbert’s sister Marjorie (Trilby Clark) keeps her brother out of jail, but he becomes a tramp, after Lyddleton murders Olive and kills himself. Marjorie’s suitor Tom Wattleby (Dunstan Webb) saves Gilbert from a bushfire, just as the drought breaks, restoring the family’s fortunes. Marjorie and Tom can now wed, as the sheep and cattle fatten on rich pasture.

After being fired from his job at a grocer, George, gets a job as a stableboy at a local stud farm run by the Fleming family. He befriends the horse Hotspur who is a favourite to win the Melbourne Cup, and develops a strong whistle which is used to make the horse run fast.

Two rival newspaper editors in New York send journalists to the South Pacific to dig up new material.