Seventy-year old Professor Susan Bridehead is writing an illicit memoir. She's risking a charge of sedition and a death sentence.

Her day job is at the Oxford campus of The University of Sydney, where she is writing the History of the Principality of Australia: The First Century. The work has been commissioned by Princess Maureen Macfarlane, whose commoner ancestors excised Australia's landmass from itself and leased it to the international community as a uranium supplier and nuclear fuel storage facility.

The Principality of Australia is the world's first virtual state, with its HQ in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The continent of Australia is now known as Patria Nullius-nobody's homeland. Environmentally ruined and mostly depopulated, the landmass is swathed in official secrecy.

Susan has her own secret; she was born in Patria Nullius, where she had a brief and tragic marriage to Jude, a mystic who believed his destiny was determined by a bizarre prophecy based on a nineteenth century novel.

In failing health and tired of writing fawning hagiographies for the Palace, Susan races to write the story of her survival in the wilderness of Patria Nullius. Will she complete her story before her arrest?