I use the plural collective memories on purpose. There is no single collective memory. Even if members of a group have experienced what they remember, they do not remember the same or in the same way. The Australian collective memory of the Vietnam War is shared by people who have not experienced the war or the anti-war movement, and even those who did take part remember other events. Their memories differ according to the nature of the social frameworks in which they did function then and do function now, the groups of which they were a member then and are a member now. This has led Ann Curthoys to state “particular social groups are constructing different ‘Vietnams’ ” , just as different people (re)construct a different Holocaust. To a large extent these differences originate from differences in mediation, which transforms the ‘historical’ Vietnam War and the ‘historical’ Holocaust’ into a represented and symbolic Vietnam War and Holocaust. Mediation not only through literature, film, and TV, but also through ceremonies, rituals, being performed and transformed, through monuments which we visit and view, and venerate or abominate in a context which is quite different from the one when they were created. Mediation through archives too: archives whose ‘tacit narratives’ are constantly re-activated and re-shaped. The sum of these collected rather than collective memories one may call social memory. Some writers prefer this term social memory over collective memory, because the former indicates the social ‘constructedness’ of memory, of the social process of remembering.