There is thus a subtle conservatism running through Stegemann’s occasionally elegiac study. He evinces the kind of plaintive feeling apparent in Edmund Burke’s lament for the losses occasioned by the French Revolution, not least of all in describing how “racist extremists on the right and the perennially distempered on the left” weaponise memory against pragmatically minded ordinary people.

Such concerns speak to a wider tradition of conservative writing in Australia – the poet Les Murray and novelist David Foster among its more well-known proponents. Indeed, Stegemann enlists Murray in arguing for the validity of those who see beauty, as opposed to subhuman redneckery, outside metropolitan Australia. Reprising “Athens vs Boeotia” conflicts, his affection for such communities seems based in part on their not being seen to speak – as he writes of the historian Manning Clark – “from [a] pulpit”.

Stegemann perhaps appreciates that amnesty is easier among small communities than at the level of the nation; although the opposition between elite and quiet majority, or between “hectoring political opportunists” who “insist on ideological orthodoxy” and those “quietly digging up and burying their family dead” neglects some aspects of this dilemma.

Greater focus on how the demand from First Nations for historical accountability and remembrance both compliments and complicates these questions might have proved salutary. Indeed, a relative lack of engagement with First Nations people and authors is one of the book’s limitations. Few appear, apart from the occasional informant, Stan Grant, and a dash of Noel Pearson.

Stegemann’s often dyspeptic focus on the “narrowly prescribed conversations of the digital sphere” and metropole/heartland binaries comes to feel like a distraction, a siren that leads Amnesia Road to risk becoming overly glib about the investment of those communities for whom amnesia remains elusive, both historically and in the present day, in seeking justice.