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Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 3 August 2018 of The Conversation est. 2011 The Conversation
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Contents

* Contents derived from the , 2018 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
The ‘Great Australian Silence’ 50 Years On, Anna Clark , single work essay

'It’s 50 years since the anthropologist WEH Stanner gave the 1968 Boyer Lectures — a watershed moment for Australian history. Stanner argued that Australia’s sense of its past, its very collective memory, had been built on a state of forgetting, which couldn’t “be explained by absent mindedness”:

 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 practised on a national scale.' (Introduction)

Section: Friday Essay
Writers’ Festivals Aren’t an Imaginary Republic of Letters – They Are Political Arenas, Leigh Boucher , single work column

'Once again, we are in the middle of a public spat about who should get to speak at a writers’ festival in Australia. It appears the Brisbane Writers Festival uninvited Bob Carr and Germaine Greer (the festival has said neither author had been signed to a contract for appearances). In a context where #metoo has demonstrated the potency of social media mobilisation, it would seem the festival has erred on the side of caution rather than inflame the Twitterverse with contentious speakers.'  (Introduction)

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