It is 1975 and a young dark-haired girl unnoticed by the world...and who works serving store customers in the modest family fruit shop... Her family migrated to Australia in mid-1960s from beautiful Italy...Gabriella works hard in the family's fruit shop under the overbearing control of her father. She becomes depressed and introverted and isolated from the social world a teenager craves. She resents the fact her brother, Enzo, can study while she had to leave school at 15 to work. She finds she is torn living within the Italian and the Australian way of modern life. Knowing the only way out, and to get far away from her father's control, is to marry a better man; then Gabriella meets Aldo, an older, single Italian at the wedding of her cousin. She is swept off her feet by Aldo's charms and looks and having fallen in love with him, they wed soon after. But it does not take long for Gabriella to realise that Aldo is not the charming man she thought he was as his anger and violence grows towards her, she becomes afraid of her husband, the man she once loved. She gains the strength to leave Aldo and begins to live her life as an independent woman. Her father is outraged and commands Gabriella to return to her husband, but she stands firm in her resolve. And for the next part of her life, lives the life she chooses...Gabriella Campania, approaching womanhood, narrates her story.