When the heir to a once thriving wool-growing dynasty discovers that her late father's lawyer is responsible for its demise, she must eliminate him before he destroys her most precious asset.

SYNOPSIS:

After a twenty-year absence, Katherine Spencer, thirty-nine-year-old marketing executive in Melbourne is summoned to the family’s wool-growing property, to reconcile with her estranged, dying father, her only kin. On inheriting the rundown enterprise, Katherine opts for a career change, and undertakes to bring about its renaissance, enlisting the help of the recently appointed manager, Cory Hamilton ­– an arrangement that soon becomes intimate, much to the chagrin of the long-time family lawyer, Raymond Hartmann, who has his own agenda.

Katherine learns that Hartmann’s involvement in the district has not been confined to the legal affairs of ‘Tatiara Park’. Although city-based, he is also a councillor in the Tatiara District, a prerequisite for which is property ownership in the region. Katherine's research reveals that much of this property once belong to Tatiara Park, purchased for a song from her father. Given the obvious conflict of interest, she severs all ties with him. Outraged, Hartmann exposes her lover's indigenous heritage, forcing Katherine to question the sincerity of her emotions and challenge her latent racial prejudices.

But when Katherine delves further into the demise of the once thriving operations, she unearths damning home truths about her father and sets in motion a train of events that exposes a culture of deception, blackmail, and forbidden love – with fatal consequences.

Seems that as a younger man, Katherine’s father had planted his seeds far and wide, with little concern for indigenous culture. And when Hartmann became privy to this fact, he ‘convinced’ his client to participate in a scheme to con Chinese investors into paying a world-record price for a dud stud ram – not difficult in the pre-forensic DNA era – laying the foundation for a continuing appropriation of the Tatiara estate.

But Hartmann’s real plan to wrest control of the Spencer land is not for the fibre that grows upon it but for the mineral wealth beneath, the area being steeped in shale oil deposits. To this end, he sets about removing the two obstacles in his way, Cory and Katherine – a mission that culminates in a showdown in Tatiara’s shearing shed.

Mortally wounding Cory, Hartmann pursues the defenceless Katherine, only to orchestrate his own demise in a classic case of misadventure, among a stack of wool bales, his heart pierced by an ancient set of wool shears, deemed “dangerous in the wrong hands”. A tragedy all round.

The real tragedy, however, is when Katherine learns that she and her lover Cory were in fact much closer than they ever realised, their intimacy forbidden by both their respective cultures.

GOOD COUNTRY