In 2010 two septuagenarians reminisce on a balcony overlooking a former town and river valley inundated fifty years before by the damned waters of the massive Snowy Mountain Scheme. One of them, Ralph McDonald, feels compelled to retell dramatic events from his youth, ones related to things hidden in the depths of his conscience and in the waters themselves.

An unlikely trio of late teenagers—the scion of Australian landed gentry, the brilliant son of middle-class Canberra academics, and the humble son of the local garage owner—together spend uncomplicated school holidays until the catalytic arrival of two individuals: an intense half Aboriginal boy who inhabits his deceased grandmother’s shack, and a singer from a distant world of glamour appearing for the winter season at the only major ski lodge in the surrounding national park. As the confession reveals, little by little, the trio—seemingly the embodiment of the Australian egalitarian myth of mateship—is poisoned by snobbery, vindictiveness, complex sexualities, deception and, above all, interpersonal exploitation.

Working through an amalgam of literary genres (bildungsroman, mystery tale, and the historic novel) The Finley Confession is a critical account of race, class and gender in contemporary Australia, but it also brings into question who owns any story and why.