Great men, for all their inspiring enterprises and awesome posturing, even tually find themselves in the dustbin of history. Death, or worse, social forgetfulness, is the final destiny even for a Stalin or a Mao. Perhaps for this reason, public status and monuments built to memorialize such men always look sadly desperate. In the busy social surroundings where they stand, they are remarkable — if we pause to look at them — only as a sign of impotence against time and remembrance. If only the nation would remember our great sacrifice, we seem to hear the call of the dead. Lest We Forget, so inscribed on the roll of graduates killed in the Great War at the main gate of the University of Sydney where I work. In contrast with the artifice of remembrance, nature — and places — seem to make a more effective stand against the conspiracy of social neglect. Sometimes, we find it easier to recall places we have been to than to remember the faces we have met, or names of people we have been introduced to. Whether or not this is always true, it is certainly the case that human countenance can never have the same dramatic quality as the city, the river, the forest or the mountain, which impress us with their visual beauty and historical associations. This is the theme of Simon Schama's monumental Landscape and Memory (1996). What the work shows up is the sheer intimacy of human perception and landscape, the way one influences the other so that a forest or a river is never that thing of nature, but comes to take on social and cultural meanings. Just as we — and our ori entations to the world — are shaped by the places where we live, work and have built our cities, landscape is always already something of our mind. For the Romantics, nature is filled with the soft murmurings of the woods that nurtures the soul, but Landscape and Memory arduously avoids