In 1968, in his Boyer Lectures, the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting:

It is a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape. What may well have begun as a simple forgetting of other possible views turned under habit and over time into something like a cult of forgetfulness practiced on a national scale. 

Stanner’s lectures have since become a defining moment of the discipline, partly because of the image he captured: for a practice based on documentation, archiving and storytelling, silence is a compelling idea...