In Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the Czech comrade Clementis places his cap on Klement Gottwald's head on the day of Communist annunciation in 1948. After Clementis is hanged four years later, his head is subsequently airbrushed out of all propaganda photographs.
Hence, 'All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head', quips Kundera.
Memory. It is everything we are. Identity is meaningless without it. Personal. Collective. Shared. Understood. What else is our history but a process of remembering? This applies on both the individual and the societal scale. 'Lest We Forget' is not only an epithet, it's literally a call for a nation to remember together.
Equally, our histories are about selective memory and the process of forgetting. Henry Reynolds asked (in a book of the same title) about the Stolen Generations, 'Why Weren't we Told?'. The teller of the story, and the omissions they make, are constitutive of the tapestry we weave.
There are many memories of Kevin Rudd that come through in David Marr's excellent Quarterly Essay 'Power Trip — The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd'. Most poignant among these is Rudd the young boy. Forced off his parents' farm after his father's death, forced to sleep with his mother Margaret in a VW on the side of country road in Queensland, the young Rudd developed a strong sense of injustice.
It was during this period that Rudd discovered what politics ought to be. As Marr puts it, this was the politics of decency. Through his experiences of being shifted from one school to another, with welfare and the public health system, Rudd became alive to what he termed 'the responsibilities of the state'. His personal remembering of the inadequacies of the services provided by the state was a catalyst for his political foundations.
Marr returns to this point several times, and it leaves the most enduring picture of Rudd the man: at once steely in his determination, polished in his performance, and yet vulnerable — alone.
The politics of decency was the centerpiece of Rudd's maiden speech to Parliament, and again in his first speech as Prime Minister. 'Compassion is not a dirty word,' he said. 'Compassion is not a sign of weakness. In my view, compassion in politics and in public policy is in fact a