Summary
Beneath the sun-scorched skies of New South Wales, a bruised pugilist-turned-pulpit-warrior named John Harland alights upon the ironically christened hamlet of Kangaroo, clutching a Bible scarred like his own cheekbones. The town’s dust is thick with sins: embezzled fortunes, juvenile delinquency, and a church whose rafters tremble under the weight of hypocrisy. Harland’s gaze is immediately captured by Muriel, luminous heiress to a grazing empire, yet orphaned and tethered to a serpentine guardian, Martin Giles, who skims her wool cheques with magisterial impunity. When the ex-prizefighter dares to lace up boxing gloves on the town’s waifs—hoping to transmute violence into discipline—pews empty, whispers sharpen, and Giles weaponizes parish ire to summon a bishop’s decree of banishment. Exiled to Sydney’s labyrinthine streets, Harland intervenes in a midnight robbery, decking muggers with the same left hook that once floored contenders; the grateful victim, an Oxford-educated squatter, tips him toward Kalmaroo, a forsaken township where the local gang has effectively padlocked every chapel door. Harland rides west, fists wrapped in faith, only to discover Muriel among the sparse congregation, her homestead adjacent but tyrannized by Red Jack Braggan, a crimson-whiskered bushranger who cracks skulls on Sunday and launders Giles’s graft the rest of the week. A melee erupts—pews splinter, Bibles fly, Muriel’s disappointment in Harland’s pacifist restraint curdles the air. Undaunted, the reverend signs on as a stockman at a neighboring station, learning to brand cattle while secretly mapping Braggan’s supply lines. Giles, sensing exposure, dispatches Braggan to abduct Muriel en route to a mortgage signing that would cement her silence; the heiress is shoved into a careening stagecoach bound for a forced midnight wedding. Harland pursues on a lathered chestnut, leaps aboard the racing vehicle, and—at the apex of Hampden Bridge—grabs Muriel’s hand, hurling both bodies into the churning Kangaroo River below, where baptism and deliverance merge in a single splash.
Synopsis
John Harland is a former boxer turned reverend posted to the town of Kangaroo. He falls in love with Muriel, an orphaned heiress, and discovers that her guardian Martin Giles is embezzling her inheritance. Harland earns the ire of parishioners by teaching young boys to box, and Giles manipulates local opinion to have the bishop remove him. Harland rescues a gentleman from a mugging in Sydney who suggests that he go to Kalmaroo where a criminal gang has driven the church out of the area. Harland preaches, and unexpectedly sees Muriel in the congregation; her property is near Kalmaroo. But her overseer is Red Jack Braggan who leads the gang which violently breaks up Harland's mission - much to the distress of Muriel who regards Harland as too timid - and is in cahoots with Giles. Harland goes to work as a station hand at a property neighbouring Muriel's. Giles arranges for Red Jack to kidnap Muriel so that he might marry the girl and thus prevent her giving evidence against him. Harland rescues Muriel: they leap from the stage coach as it thunders across Hampden Bridge into the Kangaroo River.
