Growing up in an Australian country town before World War 1, Jackie, Hanna and Cushie Moy are carefree and innocent in their love for each other. But Jackie is a dwarf, and his devotion to the beautiful Cushie is condemned by her parents. This is the story of their life-long odyssey, and of the triumph of a special kind of courage.

Missus' takes us behind the lives of Hughie and Mumma, out of the gritty realism of the inner city slum life and into the past of the stations, the bush and the country towns. We meet them as they were in the early 1920s, drifter Hugh Darcy, the unwilling hero who sweeps the dreamily innocent Margaret Kilker off her feet.Ruth Park richly creates the turmoil of those early days of their courtship - in the dusty outback.