David Walker is a distinguished Australian social historian whose eyesight deteriorated suddenly at the end of 2004 as a result of macular degeneration. His blindness caused him to reconsider his own relation to the past, and the history of his family, which had made no attempt to record it. The result was the writing of this memoir, which traces his progenitors from their settlement in the mid-north of South Australia, just south of the Goyder Line, in the late nineteenth century.