As the son of ‘the Colonial’, legendary Queen’s Captain Ian Steele, Josiah Steele dreams of one day leaving his home in New South Wales to be a commissioned officer in the Scottish Regiment.

After cutting his teeth in business on the rough and ready goldfields of Far North Queensland’s Palmer River, he finally travels to England, where he makes surprising new acquaintances - and runs into a few old ones he’d rather have left behind.

From the Australian bush to the glittering palaces of London, from the arid lands of Afghanistan and the horrors of war to the newly established Germany, dominated by Prussian ideas of militarism, Josiah Steele must now forge his own path.