Driving the research for this book has been a desire to understand why it is that the people among whom I spent my formative years, people who are neither unethical nor immoral, see themselves and their histories as separate or disconnected from the violence of colonialism. For those who have grown up in physical and social settings in which memory is part of everyday life, people, place and ‘history’ (a sense of the past) are interconnected and inseparable to their senses of emplacement and identity. For such people, a consciousness of their historical connections to place is so fundamental to their senses of self that it is implicitly understood, taken for granted and rarely reflected on or verbalised. To deeply understand the historical consciousness of members of such a group, a sustained, protracted immersion into the place and people among whom they dwell, their lifestyles and ways of being is required.

By focussing my examination on a specific and small group of people, I have been able to conduct a detailed investigation into the concrete ways the past is known and related to. Through historical research, interviews, site visits, personal experience and a survey of public and written histories the following observations about mid- northern settler descendants can be made: their consciousness of the colonial past is oriented around their first forebear to arrive in the district and occupy land that was to become the family property; their senses of history predates their forebears’ arrival in the district (for example, settler descendants know their forebears’ place of origin, reasons for leaving, who accompanied them on their voyages out), but, because oriented around a ‘foundation’ forebear, their sense of the history of the district begins with their forebears’ arrival there; many people are not interested in their family history or the history of their district and community until they are older; older family members do not necessarily speak about the past unless they are specifically asked; it is stories of dramatic and unusual events that are recalled and passed down through the generations and not information about taken- for- granted everyday life; an event has to be personally experienced by someone and communicated to others in order to be remembered; an individual's own experiences and knowledge are drawn on when making sense of the past.