William Skyvington explores the background of his maternal Irish ancestors. Their family names were Walker, Hickey, O'Keefe, Kennedy and Cranston. Among them, there was a convict and a bushranger, but most of the others were simple folk fleeing from poverty in the Old World. Rural pioneers, they were seeking greener pastures than those of their native Ireland. Their one-way journey to the Antipodes was a gigantic adventure, culminating in their helping to found a new nation.

A young Australian mining engineer invents futuristic tools for slicing through rocks and transforming them into buoyant fragments. Initially, his artificial islands are small, but his projects become increasingly bigger and more spectacular, finally attaining the dimensions of vast regions. This geopolitical fable involving Israel is a technological variation on the theme of the Wandering Jew.