As someone for whom the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a deep insight into the past I share with other South Africans, among them “ex – whites”, it was a linguistic operation, too, a recovery. If we are to make analogies between South Africa and Australia, there must be the questioning of whether there were crimes unspoken of in Australia’s past, and of whether and how they may be brought into earshot. Is it through a ‘poetic’? Or has that possibility passed?

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