Marian Quartly’s ancestors were of ‘the middling sort’, a term used by historian Margaret Hunt to describe ‘people who were neither wage labourers nor gentry’: artisans, shopkeepers, skilled tradesmen, yeoman farmers, and the like. This class of people, says Quartly, ‘shared values and expectations that were shaped by the dangers of the commercial world; they were temperate, prudent, proud of their independence’.

The many branches of Quartly’s family fitted this loose classification. Almost all hailed from England and ended up in South Australia, mainly in the 1850s. It is a surprisingly homogenous set of origins for a non-Indigenous Australian, so the book does not reflect the ethnic and cultural diversity of the colony from its earliest days – and there is no reason why it should, as it does not purport to be a history of South Australia as such.