William Stokes tells the story of his years at the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys, which he was sent to in the late 1950s for committing a series of petty crimes. Describing Westbrook was the most feared institution for boys in the whole of Queensland, he sees it as a brutal tyranny ruled by a sadistic warden, where boys laboured in the fields from dawn to dusk and where flogging was the answer for any misdemeanour, however minor. Inmates were systematically demeaned and cowed, in a regimen designed to break them.