Jimmie Blacksmith, Tom E. Lewis, is the child of an Aboriginal mother and a white father who is raised to adulthood by the Reverend Neville Jack Thompson and his wife Martha Julie Dawson. They hope their influence will civilize him and open doors for a future in early twentieth-century Australia. With a letter of recommendation from his foster family, he sets out to find steady work and carve a place for himself, but he quickly encounters people who take advantage of him, testing his resolve from the start.
His first employer, Healey, repeatedly shortchanges him by nitpicking about fence-building and refuses to provide a job reference, unwilling to admit Jimmie's illiteracy. The sting of slights and the power imbalance push him further into a world where his usefulness is constantly weighed against his race and his status.
Next, he works for the local constable, Ray Barrett as Farrell, who uses him as muscle against other Aboriginal people. Jimmie is forced to capture a former friend who is later molested and murdered while in custody, and to help cover up the death, an indictment of a system that chips away at his humanity.
Jimmie then finds a tenuous sense of stability on the Newby farm, though the family treats him little better than other employers. He falls in love with and marries his white girlfriend, Gilda Marshall, who arrives already pregnant. Gilda later gives birth to a white child, not fathered by Jimmie; while the public embarrassment wounds him, he wholeheartedly embraces fatherhood and the idea of a family.
Shortly after the birth, Jimmie’s full-caste half-brother Mort Freddy Reynolds and his uncle Tabidgi Steve Dodd arrive, and Jimmie enlists their help in his fence-building work. Yet the Newbys use their presence as an excuse to deny Jimmie his pay and provisions, insisting the extra men weren’t part of the arrangement. Mrs. Newby, Ruth Cracknell, and a schoolteacher friend, Miss Graf Elizabeth Alexander, try to persuade Gilda to take her baby and leave Jimmie for a teaching opportunity in another part of the country, but Gilda refuses.
Furious at the mistreatment his family suffers, Jimmie enlists Tabidgi to help put a “scare” into the Newby women while the men are away, planning to threaten them with hatchets. The plan backfires and descends into a rampage that leaves Mrs. Newby, Miss Graf, and all the Newby daughters but one infant dead. Jimmie’s family flee the compound, and shortly after Tabidgi, Gilda, and the child are left behind as Jimmie and Mort press on. They murder Healey as well, with Jimmie declaring war in a way he once heard described when fighting the Boers. As press coverage about Jimmie’s killings becomes nationwide, a reporter probes the city’s hangman for what might come when Jimmie is captured.
Tabidgi, captured and sentenced to death for accessory to murder, tells the court that the killings were not premeditated but impulses of anger. Still uncaptured, Jimmie and Mort encounter a schoolteacher, McCready, whom they initially wound but sparingly spare after he shows them a newspaper article about their notoriety. He convinces Jimmie to abandon Mort by suggesting Mort’s soul has been damaged by white influence. Mort, in turn, leads McCready to a farm for recovery, but is killed by a pursuing group led by the Newby males and Miss Graf’s fiancé, Dowie Steed Peter Sumner.
Jimmie himself is shot at in a lake but manages to tend his wounds and hide in a convent. When the police finally corner him, townspeople beat him as they take him to jail, and in the final scene, Rev. Neville reads him his last rites in his cell while the butcher-hangman observes, noting that, despite Jimmie’s unique appearance, his hanging will most likely proceed like any other.
