Currently, in Gaza, Israel is destroying the institutional basis for the reproduction and maintenance of social and cultural life, as well as administrative capacities to maintain records and documentation by which social and cultural life is organised. But in demolishing Palestinian homes, it is also destroying family artefacts, heirlooms, personal records, books, photographs and photographic collections that constitute a family’s capacity to reproduce its memories.

Here, I was free from prison, out of my country, free in this new country, new home, and inside this new home, new room, the smell haunted me; as if it had followed me all the way from the other side of the globe.

It's hard to calculate what knowledge would we lose in Aotearoa, in Australia, in the UK, if we busy ourselves with predictions instead of focusing on the fact that each victim has a name, a face, a story. After the World Wars, it took historians decades to realise that we needed to recover and tell the anonymous stories of those who lived and died in wartime, too long reduced to numbers of casualties or little arrows on a map. We have no such excuse now. The world’s collective memory is at stake: protect it, record it, cherish it while we still have a chance.

To ‘us’, the white, suburban, middle-class, western youth of that era – the mascots of Generation X – the nineties felt like a letdown, a second-rate Elvis impersonation of the 1960s, a commercial pastiche of its iconoclasm.