A literary meditation on the landscapes and violence of both the mulga plains of south-west Queensland and the rural backroads of Andalusia, Amnesia Road is rhapsodic and brutal, portraying the natural environments of these regions with textured, chromatic reverence while unflinchingly detailing the atrocities committed there. Through travels in both regions, Stegemann asks a question that is ‘both simple and bewilderingly complex: where did the present come from?’

While the paired exploration of these two regions and their broader histories is an unconventional approach, it’s well suited to Stegemann. ‘It is impossible not to consider one’s place here’ – here being his home, a property on Bundjalung and Mununjali Country, along the ‘spectacular borderland’ of Queensland and New South Wales. But here is also more broadly Australia and our current historical moment. Work as a boxing referee takes Stegemann on long trips through south-west Queensland, an especially neglected region in the national consciousness, he contends. Spain, meanwhile, is his adopted homeland (he received the 2018 Malaspina Award for ‘outstanding contribution to the development of scientific and cultural relations between Australia and Spain’). ‘The cliché holds true that there is nowhere like elsewhere to make sense of one’s home.’

The juxtaposition of brutalities offers insight into the banal humanness that drives them and the intergenerational trauma left in their wakes. Historian Norman Naimark exemplifies this approach, tracing the concept of genocide across centuries and continents to survey human capacity for societal-level violence in Genocide: A world history (2016). Moving from biblical times to the present, Naimark’s work is, by necessity, synoptic in its case studies. In contrast, Stegemann’s comparative exploration is focused and detailed.

Amnesia Road retraces history ‘at the level of the individual’ through tender, wrenching anecdotes of the lives and often savage deaths of people of both regions. These are layered alongside contemplations on thinkers and artists, including Patrick White, Stan Grant, Manuel Chaves Nogales, A.M. Duncan-Kemp, Judith Wright, Spinoza, Milton, and long-forgotten Swedish painter Per Torsten Jovinge. The explorations are cyclical, threaded through chapters rather than siloed by them, and embedded in fresh depictions of landscape. Stegemann’s blend of history, cultural analysis, and travelogue results in a highly original voice and a cogent study. His earlier work, The Beautiful Obscure (2017), likewise drew on documentary research, art history, memoir, and political analysis to explore Spain’s historic and cultural influences on Australia.

As Stegemann travels, he observes the present in fine detail: the strung-up dingoes whose ‘gutted bodies have been draped with bright green tinsel’; two figs trees, ‘vast knobbly constructions the size of small apartment blocks’; ‘an inland sea of grass and stubborn rivers, cracked lumpy hills and invisible ravines … its waves rolling in dulled tones of ochre and gold, swimming under mulga skies’. But his perspective encompasses the past as well, or as much as is accessible – the people who came before, the sensory detail of their quotidian rhythms, their names, dates and manners of death, whatever anecdotes survive in records. One pictures him surrounded by ghosts, attentive to what unmarked graves might be underfoot. He laments the impossibility of ever knowing the entirety of human history, the necessity of simplification and the inevitable loss. ‘We are left with an imperfect detritus’, one that becomes more imperfect with the death of each individual and each generation, and with the destruction – intentional or otherwise – of storage-intensive paper archives. In his effort to capture the multitudinousness of any one place and time, his paragraphs occasionally devolve into long lists.

While acknowledging the limitations of his non-Indigenous perspective, Stegemann laments the suffering of Australia’s First Nations peoples, both during the invasion of their lands and through the decades of displacement, poverty, and discrimination since. He envisions a future for Australia that embraces the Uluru Statement from the Heart, engendering ‘a bold step forward into a new, collective sense of purpose’.

Skull Hole, site of an Aboriginal massacre, Bladensburg National Park, Winton, Queensland (Steve Walters/Alamy) 

This unearthing of the dead and the interweaving of histories are in service of a larger, pressing argument. Stegemann urges a more nuanced consideration of history, a wider-lens perspective that attempts to encompass its immense multiplicity and explore the humanness in all its actors. He warns, also, of shallow interpretations that serve to weaponise the past, further entrenching societal divides. ‘We have a duty,’ he writes, ‘to look unsparingly at the acts committed’, and how they have shaped our present; but we must also acknowledge the limited use of contemporary morality in our assessments of the past. In summary this may sound apologist; it is definitively not.  

Stegemann skilfully models the work he believes is needed – that we grapple with our history through wide and deep reading, that we immerse ourselves in its paradoxes, that we continue to question and consider a multitude of perspectives rather than entrenching ourselves in any one. What might be achieved if we examined history outside the lens of political ideology? Could we strive for justice while relaxing ‘our contemporary insistence on grievance and opposition’? Where should we resist amnesia, and where should we allow for historical amnesty?

This isn’t about chasing some imagined objectivity, but about whether it is possible today to have a common understanding of history. It may not be, particularly amid the media’s ‘triumphant rants and disaffected jeremiads’ and the social-media landscape of digital posturing and performative conviction. But, Stegemann insists, ‘History abhors simplification as much as it abhors, and has all too often paid tragic witness to, ideological fixation.’