The woolshed at Mistake Creek has an east-west alignment ..There is tricky magnetic country near Mount Behn ..The Wyndham airstrip is sticky when wet .. Neil Quiller, a bush-pilot from the Western Australian outback, feels most at home in the air, relying on his logbooks to understand the landscape beneath. But in 1941 he becomes a photo-reconnaissance pilot in Malaya, flying over unknown territory. Betrayed by a spy and shot down over the jungle, Quiller witnesses the fall of Singapore just one frail step ahead of the advancing Japanese forces. In the ensuing devastation, Quiller unexpectedly finds love and friendship. But he also finds his cousin, Cameron Dunn, who extracts a promise from him that will challenge the limits of trust and loyalty.Meanwhile Cameron's wife, Jeannie Verco, waits alone on the Kimberley cattle station where Cameron was born and Neil grew up, for news that never comes. Then one day a crippled Dutch plane passes overhead, and four days later Anneliese appears .. A powerful story of love and adventure, Past the Headlands is about loyalty, treachery and the search for a true home in a world that has lost its bearings. 'It may end up ranking with A Town Like Alice and My Brother Jack as one of the great Australian fictional melodramas of love, war and divided allegiance.