Unwillingly given up by her birth mother and adopted into a violent household, Jill Jolliffe found the course of her life set before she even had time to choose. She ran away as a teenager and has been running ever since. Jolliffe became a thorn in the establishment's side and earned herself a hefty ASIO file. Following her instincts, she became a foreign correspondent - risking her life to report on Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, exposing sex-trafficking rackets in Portugal and ducking bullets while covering a war in Angola. Over time she realises that the recurring pattern of her career has been reporting the stories of young women in distress, as though trying to free her younger self from the chains of being a 'Forgotten Australian'. In the course of writing her memoir, an unexpected meeting with her birth mother takes her life full circle.