Andrew Gebhardt is describing his awareness of his family's connection with Mackerode, the land his great- grandfather Gustav Gebhardt purchased from the South Australian colonial government in the late 1860s. Mackerode is a sheep and crop property situated in the mid- north between Burra and Mt Bryan in the North- Eastern Highland district, 170 kilometres north of Adelaide. During my conversation with Andrew, he explained that as he went about his everyday life, as he lived his life at Mackerode, which was both his home and workplace, the physical legacies of earlier generations – their imprints in and on the country – provided constant and enduring reminders of earlier times.

Places in which rural settler descendants live are deeply culturalised landscapes; they are physical spaces invested with cultural meanings, sites of ‘intense cultural activity and imagination – of memory, of affectivity, of work, of sociality, of identity’. For South Australian settler descendants such as Andrew who have grown up on land occupied by their forebears in the nineteenth century, tangible reminders of the past – the homesteads in which they grow up, farm buildings such as implement sheds and woolsheds, living and nonliving markers in the landscape such as trees, ruins and fence posts and objects such as furniture and photos – are an integral part of everyday life. However, there is a need to take into account the cultural frame through which these physical reminders of historical connections to place are interpreted.