Chris Healy. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press 2008 [Book review]

The topic of Chris Healy's book Forgetting Aborigines is not new. Probably the best known critique of white Australia's treatment of indigenous Australians is W E H Stanner's 1968 Boyer Lecture After the Dreaming in which he coined the term the "Great Australian Silence." Stanner refers not only to the physical treatment of indigenous Australians but also to the way they had been excluded from modern Australian history. He argues that the changes that had occurred in the 1930s had been confined to a small group and that the referendum of 1967 had similarly had little impact

Blurring the Boundaries: History, Memory and Imagination in the Works of W G Sebald

Walter Benjamin in his essay on Marcel Proust claims that “all great works of literature establish a genre or dissolve one - that they are, in other words, special cases.” When W G Sebald’s fiction was first published many critics found it difficult to define his style or categorise his work, and indeed some claimed he had created a new genre. His work has been variously described as “literary monism,” a “generic hybridity” and “documentary novels” and Joyce Hackett claims he has “reinvent[ed] the diary as his own genre.