In November 1839 a passenger ship, Palmyra, sailed slowly up a creek until it reached a jumble of temporary buildings that constituted a port. Surrounded by dismaying mangrove swamps, the passengers disembarked and organised themselves and their possessions into port carts. Their drive, along a dusty road through sparse, sunburnt grass, in a wind blowing directly from the north as though from a furnace, eventually jolted them across a meagre river into a settlement of broad, straight streets, lined with tents, interspersed with houses of brick, wood, earth or stone. This was Adelaide – the centre of a three-year-old British colony established on the coastal plain of Gulf St Vincent in South Australia. Among the passengers scrambling out of the port carts was a red-headed young woman, undoubtedly sunburnt, and appalled by her surroundings. ‘When we sat down on a log in Light square, waiting till my father brought the key of the wooden house in Gilles street, in spite of the dignity of my 14 years just attained, I had a good cry’. This was Catherine Helen Spence.

Nearly three-quarters of a century later, in October 1905, in a church school-room in Adelaide, a public gathering celebrated Catherine Spence's 80th birthday. At that party, South Australia's chief justice proclaimed her: