Trudi Tate and Keir Reeves engage in a conversation about their work on Australia’s involvement in foreign wars, and how this is remembered (or not) in the years which follow.
Trudi talks about her recent book, The Listening Watch (2013), which is based on interviews with an Australian veteran who served in Viet Nam. Written in the spirit of W. G. Sebald it explores questions of listening and bearing witness to wars, and to those who have served, and it meditates upon the effects of trauma on an individual and his family.
Keir explores the concept of writing about war memories, history and travel to destinations associated with difficult heritage. He wrote about these themes in the co-edited Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with Difficult Heritage (2009) and the co-authored Anzac Journeys: Walking the Battlefields of the Second World War (forthcoming 2013).
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