Numerous scholars working in diverse fields and disciplines who are interested in understanding how the past is recollected through individual, social and collective memory stress the important link between experience and memory. They point out that individual memory is crucial to the production of information that passes through the generations; memory is not a random terrain where anything goes – nothing will be transmitted unless someone, at some time, has remembered it on the basis of personal experience and communicated this memory to others. Regarding social memory, scholars remind us of the need to keep in view the ‘experiential bases on which collective memory rests’ and that histories which are told in specific places are closely related to very specific experiences. Myths similarly arise in the course of human experience; they too have human/ historical sources and are created and recreated in the midst of historical contingency.

These conclusive findings reinforce the need for memory scholars to seriously acknowledge that settler descendants’ understandings and narratives of the colonial past are connected to aspects of reality experienced by previous generations. Factors such as the timing of arrival, geography of place of settlement and, relatedly and most importantly, the extent, nature and calibre of my interviewees’ forebears’ relations with Aboriginal people are historical contingencies which must be taken into account. Historical research enables us to distinguish between different types of colonists – pastoralists and freeholders, for example. By providing a more nuanced account and utilising more precise, accurate terms, we are better placed to demonstrate how one's forebears’ experiences shape current generations’ attitudes and perceptions of the colonial past. We are also better able to critically question and test memory in order to learn what in settler descendants’ narratives and understandings is empirically accurate and what has a different, but equally significant, status.