This shocking tale of one young woman’s fight for survival and connection is not for the faint of heart.

Judy McNeil is only fourteen when her father dies in a railway accident.

Unable to keep living in railway employee housing, her mother takes Judy and her five siblings to live in Brisbane, where she soon remarries and begins a new life. Unfortunately, it is not a safe situation for Judy. After attacking her new stepfather, she flees to Sydney, carrying her only belongings in a cardboard port (a suitcase).

Alone and vulnerable, she moves in with a prostitute, stealing the money of clients to feed herself. She falls in love with a Singaporean man named Richard, but finds no mercy in him. He sends her to Singapore to live with his family, while he remains behind in Australia.

Only a teenager, Judy must adjust to strange new customs in this foreign world, to protect herself and her young children. She saves the life of an Indian prostitute, but bringing her home as her servant only makes life harder.

Avoiding conflict with her in-laws is impossible; she leaves the family home, but soon finds herself at the mercy of one of Malaya’s headhunting Dayak rebels, turning to prostitution to feed herself and her children.

An epic tale of disappointment in human beings’ treatment of each other, this memoir confronts the nature of evil with the triumphant power of one woman’s will to survive.

The sequel, No One’s Child, is an incredible story of Judith’s childhood growing up along the railway lines in outback Australia in the 1950s.