What do you think?
Rate this book
Amnesia Road
How vast then is forgetting — of language, of places, of the dead? Are these even things that can be measured? They are not — but they can be described.
Amnesia Road is a powerful literary consideration of historic violence in two different parts of the world, the seldom-visited mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the backroads of rural Andalusia. It is also an unashamed celebration of the landscapes where this violence — frontier conflict and civil war — has been carried out.
Australian Hispanist Luke Stegemann uncovers neglected history and its victims and asks where such forgotten people can find a place in contemporary debates around history, nationality, guilt and identity. Stegemann writes powerfully about these landscapes, finding threads of forgotten history, particularly the brutal murderous Indigenous history that is so often deliberately ignored and the mass killings of civilians in the Spanish Civil War, in Andalusia and Cádiz in particular.
Characterised by beautiful, lush writing that remains unflinching, this book prompts us to consider traumatic history and the places where it unfolded in new ways.
Amnesia Road is a powerful literary consideration of historic violence in two different parts of the world, the seldom-visited mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the backroads of rural Andalusia. It is also an unashamed celebration of the landscapes where this violence — frontier conflict and civil war — has been carried out.
Australian Hispanist Luke Stegemann uncovers neglected history and its victims and asks where such forgotten people can find a place in contemporary debates around history, nationality, guilt and identity. Stegemann writes powerfully about these landscapes, finding threads of forgotten history, particularly the brutal murderous Indigenous history that is so often deliberately ignored and the mass killings of civilians in the Spanish Civil War, in Andalusia and Cádiz in particular.
Characterised by beautiful, lush writing that remains unflinching, this book prompts us to consider traumatic history and the places where it unfolded in new ways.
320 pages, Paperback
Published June 1, 2020
About the author
Luke Stegemann
4 books11 followersLuke Stegemann is a writer, editor, translator and former media business manager. He has spent nearly three decades living between Europe and Australia. He is most recently the author of The Beautiful Obscure: Australian Pathways through the Cultural History of Spain. He currently lives in rural Queensland where he teaches media, film and television.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 20, 2021
This book is a masterpiece! Original, wise, morally complex and astute. Stegemann is brilliant with language and he looks truly deeply at landscapes, on Virginia Woolf’s scale. The concept of the book is brilliant too – a dialogue between two so different at first glance slices of history. But what truly makes this book wonderful is the moral compass of the author. How he sees through our era's many cliches and hypocrisies.
April 20, 2021
Paradoxically, this book is both great and dismal. The clue is in the subtitle "Landscape, Violence and Memory". Of these three themes, the first two are done justice in the most poetic and sensitive way (as much as is possible, for the horrors of mass murder and genocide). The landscape's enduring beauty is paid tribute in eloquent prose, as echoes of historic horrors escalate through contemporary roo shooters and roadkill to the ghastly carcasses of shot dingoes strung up along roadsides throughout southwest Queensland.
The core of the book is really the central two chapters, Threnody and Iberian hinterland. The account of the crimes of colonialism and fascist reaction is not comprehensive, but as bleakly illustrative as I think I can stomach. The colonial occupation of South-West Queensland by squatters occurred quite deliberately off the record. The chapter on the fascist occupation of Southern Spain thus fills the gap with an account of enough of the ghastly details of murderous terror to fill in the blanks in our imaginations.
Stegemann has both illumined a little-appreciated episode of Australian history, while paying enough attention to detail not to oversimplify it. He points out that those pastoralists and station managers invading Indigenous lands were not all the primary instigators; many were simply employees trying to do the best they could - and within that mix there were psychopathic killers as well as those disturbed and upset by the violence. And although the great majority of murderous terror in Spain was carried out by the fascists, there were enough incidences on the other side to be be of some shame to the Republican side - but he argues explicitly against a false equivalence: clearly the defining feature was the violence of the conquerors not the conquered.
The third element of the book, the discussion of memory and amnesia in early and closing chapters, unfortunately takes this sensitive but solid telling of an important story and throws it into confusion. Stegemann spends a lot of time excoriating what he sees as a woke inner-city left that spend their time in moral outrage condemning historical figures and events for not matching up to their contemporary morality. Rather he looks to some of the contemporary revival of Indigenous culture as a positive, forward looking view of what Australia is and is becoming, and the simple unassuming fairness of the less educated folks of working class Australia. He's happy to argue a political equivalence of right and left in the modern era: "Both racist extremists on the right, and the perennially distempered on the left, are best ignored in favour of that other, majority Australia, of people who have nothing but goodwill for their neighbours, of whatever stripe... The idea that they have been duped, that their false consciousness does not allow them to be aware of the critical cultural battles of the day, is not just absurd; it is condescending."
This doesn't prevent a lot of very condescending attacks on the left, generally as little more than a straw figure to bash. To what end? Paradoxically, in a book that uncovers painful memories, Stegemann seems to be arguing in favour of a kind of forgetting at the same time as he's helping us with the remembering.
What Stegemann seems to be arguing is the tired old reactionary line against the "black armband" view of history. He can't put the past into any contemporary context, because he sees superficial attitudes, and perhaps resurgent, vibrant Indigenous cultural organisations, as the extent of the modern manifestation of a violent history. In fact, in a telling two-page summary near the end, he argues that in spite of the popular slogan "Always was, always will be" Indigenous land in practical fact most of it is not. Land is probably the most tangible manifestation of the thread of injustice that binds the horrors of the 1840s (in South-West Queensland) to the contemporary injustices that motivate those inner city leftists, but hardly the only one. And for a book so much about Indigenous people's history and fortunes, there is an apparent dearth of Indigenous voices and views.
If there's anything I'd take from this, it is the reactionary superficiality of this view of history. In seeking to dissolve persistent economic and structural injustices into a formless mass of individual attitudes and trite bonhomie, he is indeed arguing to forget the very things he has done such a brilliant job of helping us to remember. A strange, paradoxical book - but even if you only read the central two chapters, entirely worth the effort.
The core of the book is really the central two chapters, Threnody and Iberian hinterland. The account of the crimes of colonialism and fascist reaction is not comprehensive, but as bleakly illustrative as I think I can stomach. The colonial occupation of South-West Queensland by squatters occurred quite deliberately off the record. The chapter on the fascist occupation of Southern Spain thus fills the gap with an account of enough of the ghastly details of murderous terror to fill in the blanks in our imaginations.
Stegemann has both illumined a little-appreciated episode of Australian history, while paying enough attention to detail not to oversimplify it. He points out that those pastoralists and station managers invading Indigenous lands were not all the primary instigators; many were simply employees trying to do the best they could - and within that mix there were psychopathic killers as well as those disturbed and upset by the violence. And although the great majority of murderous terror in Spain was carried out by the fascists, there were enough incidences on the other side to be be of some shame to the Republican side - but he argues explicitly against a false equivalence: clearly the defining feature was the violence of the conquerors not the conquered.
The third element of the book, the discussion of memory and amnesia in early and closing chapters, unfortunately takes this sensitive but solid telling of an important story and throws it into confusion. Stegemann spends a lot of time excoriating what he sees as a woke inner-city left that spend their time in moral outrage condemning historical figures and events for not matching up to their contemporary morality. Rather he looks to some of the contemporary revival of Indigenous culture as a positive, forward looking view of what Australia is and is becoming, and the simple unassuming fairness of the less educated folks of working class Australia. He's happy to argue a political equivalence of right and left in the modern era: "Both racist extremists on the right, and the perennially distempered on the left, are best ignored in favour of that other, majority Australia, of people who have nothing but goodwill for their neighbours, of whatever stripe... The idea that they have been duped, that their false consciousness does not allow them to be aware of the critical cultural battles of the day, is not just absurd; it is condescending."
This doesn't prevent a lot of very condescending attacks on the left, generally as little more than a straw figure to bash. To what end? Paradoxically, in a book that uncovers painful memories, Stegemann seems to be arguing in favour of a kind of forgetting at the same time as he's helping us with the remembering.
What Stegemann seems to be arguing is the tired old reactionary line against the "black armband" view of history. He can't put the past into any contemporary context, because he sees superficial attitudes, and perhaps resurgent, vibrant Indigenous cultural organisations, as the extent of the modern manifestation of a violent history. In fact, in a telling two-page summary near the end, he argues that in spite of the popular slogan "Always was, always will be" Indigenous land in practical fact most of it is not. Land is probably the most tangible manifestation of the thread of injustice that binds the horrors of the 1840s (in South-West Queensland) to the contemporary injustices that motivate those inner city leftists, but hardly the only one. And for a book so much about Indigenous people's history and fortunes, there is an apparent dearth of Indigenous voices and views.
If there's anything I'd take from this, it is the reactionary superficiality of this view of history. In seeking to dissolve persistent economic and structural injustices into a formless mass of individual attitudes and trite bonhomie, he is indeed arguing to forget the very things he has done such a brilliant job of helping us to remember. A strange, paradoxical book - but even if you only read the central two chapters, entirely worth the effort.
June 20, 2021
There are few other people whose knowledge spans both south-western Queensland and Andalusia, apart from fleeting visits by most travellers. This is where Hispanist and cultural historian Luke Stegemann comes in. He travels the backroads of Queensland as a boxing referee, while he refers to Spain as his 'second patria'. Deeply familiar with both, he brings them together in what is described as a "literary examination" of landscape, violence and memory in the two places. ...
This really is a beautifully written book. You could open any page and find a paragraph that is beautifully crafted and insightful. It has high expectations of the reader. The dual emphasis on Indigenous Australia and Andalusia particularly appealed to me because my interests align along those tracks as well, but also because it illustrates the way that our learning in one field illuminates and enriches the other fields of knowledge that we encounter.
For my complete review, please visit
https://residentjudge.com/2021/06/20/...
This really is a beautifully written book. You could open any page and find a paragraph that is beautifully crafted and insightful. It has high expectations of the reader. The dual emphasis on Indigenous Australia and Andalusia particularly appealed to me because my interests align along those tracks as well, but also because it illustrates the way that our learning in one field illuminates and enriches the other fields of knowledge that we encounter.
For my complete review, please visit
https://residentjudge.com/2021/06/20/...
Read
April 7, 2021In Death by Water 2, poet David Musgrave describes how, “Seven generations ago, having shot his load/ of rum and sperm in Sydney Cove,/ Stephen Tuckerman, Captain of the USS Carolina disappeared off the coast of Chile with all his crew”. The poem’s narrative of oblivion and forgetting, traversing Latin America and Australia, concludes: “the past spreads out beyond the present/carrying into life its drifting dead”.
Luke Stegemann appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation.
Luke Stegemann appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation.CREDIT:
Luke Stegemann is known as a historian, Hispanist and editor and Amnesia Road is invested in concepts of remoteness and anonymity: of geographies, histories, peoples. It is informed by Stegemann’s life on Bundjalung and Mununjali country, on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, where he referees boxing matches on the weekend.
Musgrave’s image of watery oblivion is recalled in the book’s opening, when Stegemann writes: “True to its task of transmission and displacement, the river carries one part of the continent away to another; it adds and subtracts, gives and takes. The river feeds the young, just as it carries away the dead, downstream.” The image prefigures or encompasses one of the text’s larger questions, one that is “both simple and bewilderingly complex: where did the present come from?”
Moving between the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and rural Andalusia, Amnesia Road feels like an expansion of Stegemann’s 2017 debut, The Beautiful Obscure, which combined art history, memoir, and political analysis to explore Spanish influences on Australia.
Continue reading: https://www.theage.com.au/culture/boo...
Luke Stegemann appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation.
Luke Stegemann appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation.CREDIT:
Luke Stegemann is known as a historian, Hispanist and editor and Amnesia Road is invested in concepts of remoteness and anonymity: of geographies, histories, peoples. It is informed by Stegemann’s life on Bundjalung and Mununjali country, on the border of Queensland and New South Wales, where he referees boxing matches on the weekend.
Musgrave’s image of watery oblivion is recalled in the book’s opening, when Stegemann writes: “True to its task of transmission and displacement, the river carries one part of the continent away to another; it adds and subtracts, gives and takes. The river feeds the young, just as it carries away the dead, downstream.” The image prefigures or encompasses one of the text’s larger questions, one that is “both simple and bewilderingly complex: where did the present come from?”
Moving between the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and rural Andalusia, Amnesia Road feels like an expansion of Stegemann’s 2017 debut, The Beautiful Obscure, which combined art history, memoir, and political analysis to explore Spanish influences on Australia.
Continue reading: https://www.theage.com.au/culture/boo...
May 13, 2025
This book sounds like something I would write, I can't believe someone made it into a whole book. Great minds think alike. And no I am not saying "I could have written this" or all that in an effort to sound better. I'm saying we think very similar in terms of landscape (Me at nine strolling around Salamanca Market and declaring: "Oh, this could be like Spain!") me looking out of my window: "Oh, this is just like a town in Connecticut!" Ironically, two places I have never been to, which adds to the magic.
July 29, 2021
I found this both reflective of some of the environments I have experienced, and repetitive in terms of a lack of understanding of how settlers waged a one-sides war against aboriginals. On the latter, yes, the story must be taught from primary school until all living Australians have a more accurate view of early white invasions. The Spain aspects didn't grab me: You can always find parallels. Shorter would have been more impactful.
January 2, 2022
Beautiful, arresting prose. A sober, thoughtful, compassionate exploration of how we deal with collective memory and amnesia, guilt and reconciliation, and truth and beauty through the twin lenses of south-west Queensland and Andalusia. Informative, meditative, entertaining, and provocative. Highly recommended.
October 11, 2021
Beautifully (over) written and so dark. The horrors of two conflicts are placed alongside each other, jammed awkwardly alongside each other, but there is something else here too: in the landscape that grows back over the fence lines, something like hope.
August 22, 2022
A stunning contribution to any discussion on Australian history and identity. An unexpected juxtaposition of Australian colonial history and the Spanish civil war. Dark, disturbing, challenging, discomforting, magnificently written, with stunning description of landscape and place.
Read
July 16, 2021devastating, bit of a start to some understanding of genocide
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2026
Beautifully written, but the focus was disjointed by having two countries featured. I think this would have benefitted from more attention on one.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews