Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards — Australian History Prize 2021

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.

‘This book will come to be regarded as a classic of Australian literature.’ — Nicolas Rothwell

Luke Stegemann is a writer, Hispanist and cultural historian based in rural south-east Queensland. He has held senior positions in media, publishing and higher education in Australia, Europe and Asia. Luke has written on art, politics and history for a wide range of Australian and Spanish publications, and is the author of The Beautiful Obscure (2017). In 2018 he received the Malaspina Award in recognition of his ‘outstanding contribution to the development of cultural relations between Australia and Spain’. On weekends, he travels extensively around Queensland in his role as a referee on the state amateur boxing circuit.