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Tony Hughes-d'Aeth Tony Hughes-d'Aeth i(A20246 works by) (a.k.a. Tony Hughes d'Aeth)
Born: Established: 1972 ;
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Kim Scott’s Taboo and the Extimacy of Massacre Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Australian Studies , vol. 45 no. 2 2021; (p. 165-180)

'Kim Scott’s novel Taboo (2017) centres on the Kukenarup massacre, which followed the fatal spearing of John Dunn in 1880 on the ancestral lands of the Wirlomin Noongar people. Taboo traces the dynamics of silence that run through the lives of Noongar and settler descendants in the wake of massacre. What the novel underscores is that while a massacre may be located at a particular site and commemorated by public gestures (plaques, memorials and ceremonies), its reality cannot ultimately be separated from the inner lives of the survivors and their descendants. This article argues that the terrain of massacre is shown in Scott’s novel to be quintessentially extimate, a word that Jacques Lacan coined to describe the intimate exterior of psychic reality. As a concept, the extimate helps name the space that is routinely excluded by the deployment of public and private domains in the liberal capitalist order, whereby social suffering is consigned to a privatised interior, and private violence is made banal by empty public utterance.' (Publication abstract)

1 The Cybernetic Wheatbelt : John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Angelaki , vol. 26 no. 2 2021; (p. 43-54)

'John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008) is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives (and its agents) have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine.' (Publication summary)

1 y separately published work icon Angelaki The Kinsellaverse : The Writing World of John Kinsella vol. 26 no. 2 Nicholas Birns (editor), Tony Hughes-d'Aeth (editor), 2021 21492030 2021 periodical issue criticism

'Criticism on the work of John Kinsella is made particularly lively by the fact that Kinsella himself practices so much criticism, and self-criticism, in his poetry, fiction, and essays. This can make it, though, harder as well as easier for the critic to operate, to gain a foothold or angle of vision, to trace without trying to rival the primary author’s creativity, ingenuity, and verve. Also posing a daunting hurdle is the sheer stamina Kinsella has as an author; that he produces so much in so many different genres that, while always remaining in a coherent field of meaning, is consistently original and diverse.' (Nicholas Birns, A Type of House-Paint for All Weathers, introduction)


'The extraordinary literary output of John Kinsella has thus far exceeded the capacity of criticism to deal with it. This special issue of Angelaki is an attempt to close the gap, but as the guest editors we are only too aware of how we must still fall short. This issue draws on a range of scholars who have followed Kinsella’s work, often over many years. While John Kinsella was born and grew up in the southwest of Western Australia, his reach has extended globally, particularly through the anglophone centres of Britain and the United States, but increasingly through other parts of the world including continental Europe and China. We will not attempt to catalogue Kinsella’s works here since, with Kinsella, such lists are almost immediately out of date. But more importantly, the totalising gesture of doing so runs against the basic ethos of Kinsella’s project. Despite its epic scale, Kinsella’s work always exists as an intervention and not an edifice. It has a negative capability, akin to the sublime and serial grandeur of paintings of the Last Judgement in Christian eschatology or the sprawling tableaux of medieval tapestry. But if his work is a tapestry, then Kinsella presents his images from the other side, as an assemblage of knots and ends. In this issue, we as critics have occasionally presumed to flip the work around and offer an image in more conventional terms, but readers will know that this procedure is something that must always remain critically contingent. (Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, The KinsellaVerse : The Writing World of John Kinsella, introduction)

1 y separately published work icon Tony Hughes-d'Aeth on Australia's Literary Regionalism Tony Hughes-d'Aeth (presenter), Southbank : Australian Book Review, Inc. , 2020 23439628 2020 single work podcast

'Is it possible to parse Australian writers by states and territories? In today's episode, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth – Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia – speculates about new ways of contemplating Australian writers through the lens of regionalism. As he writes in his upcoming essay 'Thinking in a regional accent: New ways of contemplating Australian writers': 'Yes, we are divided into states and territories, but are these anything other than lines on a map, drawn with a ruler and a set square, and the occasional river? The contrast between the political map of Australia and the now iconic AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia graphically exposes the poverty of the Australian regional imagination and the essential irreality of our territorial demarcations. More particularly, for someone like me, is it right to conceive of Australia in terms of literary regions?'' (Production summary)

1 Stealing the Scene : Brian Castro's Double-Wolf Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , June vol. 34 no. 1 2020; (p. 85-100)

'Brian Castro's novel Double-Wolf (1991) is a playful fictionalization of the life of the Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff (Pankeyev, 1886–1979), known to history as the "Wolf Man." This essay seeks to situate Castro's novel within the context of both psychoanalysis and literary postmodernism and to explore the particularities of the Wolf Man case as a narrative that problematizes the borders of fictionality. Like Pankejeff himself, Castro's Double-Wolf remains both skeptical and faithful to Freudian precepts. To maintain this double affinity, the novel adopts a parodic stance and is written in the form of a postmodern farce. However, the purpose of the parody is not finally to suggest that the insights of psychoanalysis are nonsense but that their truth so radically disrupts common sense that they can only be upheld in an absurdist register. Just like Freud's case history, the novel turns on a primal scene, and it is only the existence of such a scene that makes the encounter between the novel's two protagonists (Sergei Wespe and Art Catacomb) meaningful. While the plot of the novel revolves around the attempt to prevent a scandal—the fear that a suddenly chatty Wolf Man might belatedly subvert the psychoanalytic practice that his neuroses helped establish—its true subject is the deeper scandal of knowledge itself and the fact that it might end in a scene and not a statement.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Landscape (After Mabo) Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020;
1 Review : Australianama: The South Asian Odyssey in Australia Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , December no. 67 2020;

— Review of Australianama : The South Asian Odyssey in Australia Samia Khatun , 2019 multi chapter work criticism poetry prose biography
1 1 Thinking in a Regional Accent : New Ways of Contemplating Australian Writers Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 426 2020; (p. 24-26)

'Who would have guessed that a rejuvenation of regional difference might be triggered by a plague? Cosmopolitan Melbourne became the epicentre of what Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called the ‘Victorian wave’. Borders, the leitmotif of Australian politics since Tampa, suddenly became internal. My own state of Western Australia was sued for breach of the Australian Constitution for maintaining its ‘hard’ internal borders. Wonted barbs flowing between states now felt just a little personal. Interstate rivalry in Australia is not uncommon, with familiar stoushes over GST share, the Murray– Darling Basin, the location of naval shipbuilding, and the hosting of sporting events. But the idea that Australia has internal borders, not just to check fruit but to stop the movement of people, Australian people, is something that has only emerged with Covid-19.' (Introduction)

1 Review : Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Considers Griefs Big and Small Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 9 October 2020;

— Review of The Living Sea of Waking Dreams Richard Flanagan , 2020 single work novel

'The Living Sea of Waking Dreams, Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel, is one of a slew of novels one expects to emerge from the shadow of the 2019–2020 bushfire season that darkened the skies of eastern Australia for weeks on end, scorching forests from Byron Bay to Kangaroo Island.' (Introduction)

1 Vicissitudes and Unbelonging : A Penitential Memoir from a Prolific Poet Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , September no. 424 2020; (p. 61)

— Review of Displaced : A Rural Life John Kinsella , 2020 single work autobiography

'John Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life.' (Introduction)

1 DIRT - Introduction to 2019 ASAL Conference Issue Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 20 no. 1 2020;
'On Sunday 24 May 2020, the Rio Tinto mining company destroyed a 46,000-year-old human habitation and sacred site at Juukan Gorge in the Pilbara (‘Rio Tinto blast destroys 46,000-yearold Aboriginal heritage site’). UNESCO compared the act to the destruction of Palmyra by Islamic State. Rio was granted permission to conduct this and other blasts in 2013, under section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Amongst artefacts found recently at the site were a 24,000- year-old bone tool and a fragment of a 4,000-year-old belt plaited from human hair. The following week, on Thursday 4 June, in a suburban street in the marginal Federal seat of EdenMonaro which had been chosen as the location for the Federal Government to announce a home renovation subsidy, the Prime Minister of Australia Scott Morrison was interrupted in midstream by a miffed home-owner asking the gaggle of politicians and press to move off his lawn as he had just had it re-seeded (‘Get off the grass, homeowner tells Scott Morrison’). They meekly complied, realising that there was a certain sanctity in this quiet Australian’s request. There is an obvious obscenity in putting together these two events but at some level they are indicative of what we were aiming to interrogate at the 2019 ASAL conference on the theme of ‘Dirt,’ which we hosted at the University of Western Australia. As the convenor, I was delighted with the way the conference drew together such a rich range of papers, discussions, addresses, readings and launches. In our thinking about a conference theme we had wanted to explore the way Australian literature and Australian literary studies were working in the contemporary moment and we settled suddenly on the concept of ‘dirt.’ The idea was proposed by my colleague, Alison Bartlett, and our organising committee were immediately taken with it as a concept. It seemed to touch on something essential—in an era sceptical of essences—and material. It reached out into the contested condition of Australian land: dirt as country, dirt as real estate. It reached out into the substance of life: dirt as biotic habitat. It reached out into the source of Australia’s material prosperity: dirt as ore (pay-dirt), dirt as agricultural growing medium (soil). And it reached out into the negative connotation that dirt carries: dirt as scandal, as secret, as abject exclusion.'

 (Introduction)

1 Akin to Musical Composition : Fifty Years of Language and Landscape Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2020 single work review
— Appears in: TEXT : The Journal of the Australian Association of Writing Programs , April vol. 24 no. 1 2020;

— Review of In the Hollow of the Land : Collected Poems 1968-2018 Glen Phillips , 2018 selected work poetry
'In the Hollow of the Land collects sixty years of poetry by Western Australian writer Glen Phillips in two volumes published by Wild Weeds Press. Glen Phillips was born in 1936 and the poems stretch from the author’s early 30s into his 80s. In terms of a career, it is notable that the production of poems by Phillips has tended to accelerate in the latter years, and has been particularly prolific since his retirement from Edith Cowan University in 2001. Taken together, the poems in In the Hollow of the Land provide a significant document of record not just of a sensibility that is responsive to his world, but of this world itself.' (Introduction)
1 The Settler Colonial Farm Novel in Australia Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 64 no. 1 2019; (p. 194-212)
'The relationship of Australian literature to rural hinterlands is generally captured, both within criticism and popular parlance, by reference to the concept of the bush. This slightly amorphous concept is essentially understood in negative terms to encompass everything that is not a city. Wilderness and country towns, deserts and mountains, farms and stations, remote Aboriginal communities and peri-urban peripheries are all at times imagined as being (in) the bush. As Don Watson put it: ‘The bush is everything from a gum tree to any of the creatures that live in it or shelter beneath it, and it is the womb and inspiration of the national character’ (66). The bush is a denominator of sociological, ecological and economic difference, and invoked in debates as diverse as water policy and telecommunications, wind-farms and youth suicide. It occupies the space set aside for ‘regions’ in other nations and traditions and shares some of the class dimensions that Raymond Williams identified as being central to a ‘regional’ identity. And in Australia, too, the bush is often a synonym and a metonym of ‘the regions’ or ‘regional Australia’. The fact that a concept can have such a protean and omnivorous application, stretching over much of the continental mass of Australia and transecting debates in national policy, reminds us that the bush has a central and ongoing ideological function within Australia as a settler nation. It operates, in short, as a continuously available and infinitely malleable support to public moral assertions. Somewhat paradoxically, as well as being ubiquitous, the bush is also unique, in the sense that the bush is imagined as being uniquely Australian, and even that which makes Australia unique, ‘the source of the nation’s idea of itself’ (Watson 66). An essence, in other words. The particular status of the bush is not upheld in abstract terms but manifests at every level of national discourse, and is sustained by cultural products from both elite and popular dimensions of social life in Australia. From reality television (The Crocodile Hunter, Farmer Wants a Wife) to popular rural romance novels written for women (‘ru-ro’, ‘chook-lit’; see Martin), on the one hand, to the most revered movements in painting, literature and cinema, on the other, the bush runs like a grey-green thread through the Australian cultural imaginary.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon Fiction in the Age of Risk Tony Hughes-d'Aeth (editor), Golnar Nabizadeh (editor), New York (City) : Routledge , 2018 21549853 2018 anthology criticism

'When Ulrich Beck theorised a ‘Risk Society’ (Risikogesellschaft) in 1986, the threat of global annihilation through nuclear war remained uppermost in the minds of his readership. Three decades on, questions about whether the sensation of risk has mutated or evolved in the intervening period, and whether fiction exhibits evidence of such a change, remain just as urgent. While the immediate risk of the Cold War’s ‘mutually assured destruction’ through World War Three seems to have ebbed, the paradox is that the social goal of safety and security seem to elude attainment. Global financial collapse, Islamic terrorism, human-authored climate change, epidemic disease outbreaks, refugee crises and the chronic erosion of the welfare state now preoccupy those in the developed world and provide the horizons for contemporary anxieties worldwide.

'The contributions to this volume explore these themes, locating their significance and representation in a diverse range of contemporary literature, film, and comics, from China, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Pakistan, and the United States. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.  (Publication summary)

1 Farm Novel or Station Romance? The Geraldton Novels of Randolph Stow Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 1 no. 18 2018;

'Critical interpretations of Randolph Stow's works have been inclined to see them as studies of alienation.  This essay addresses the material basis for the novels that Stow set in the Geraldton hinterland, namely A Haunted Land (1956), The Bystander (1957), and Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965).  Against the metaphysical and postcolonial readings of Stow's work, this essay posits an alienation that stems from a change in agricultural mode from pastoral to farming.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Reading the Landscape : University Publishing Houses and the National Creative Estate Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: The Conversation , 17 September 2018;

'It is actually quite difficult to imagine what Australian literature would look like without the University of Queensland Press (UQP). Since it was established in 1948, it has done as much as any Australian publisher to shape Australian creative writing. The title of this excellent anthology Reading the Landscape refers to this literary landscape rather than any thematic interest in Australia’s land.'  (Introduction)

1 Dark Emu and the Blindness of Australian Agriculture Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: The Conversation , 15 June 2018;

'What if Australia were to stop farming? At approximately 3% of gross domestic product, the removal of agriculture from the economy would be a significant hit. It would affect our balance of payments — 60% of agricultural produce is exported and it contributes 13% of Australia’s export revenue.' (Introduction)

1 A. Frances Johnson, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage : Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Novel Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 17 no. 2 2018;

'A Frances Johnson is a poet, novelist, artist and teacher of creative writing. This book is the result of research she undertook as a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, where she is now the Head of Creative Writing in that University’s School of Culture and Communication. It took me a little while to apprehend the form of this book, because it was slightly novel to me. It is a study of the Australian ‘postcolonial novel’. What is meant by this is that bracket of Australian fiction written between the 1980s and the current moment (1989-2014, in fact) and which deals with the dire consequences that European colonisation had for Indigenous Australia. Johnson’s case studies are Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, Matthew Kneale, Richard Flanagan, Rohan Wilson … and herself.'(Introduction)

1 Writing the WA Wheatbelt, a Place of Radical Environmental Change Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2017 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 18 May 2017;

'What can creative literature tell us about radical environmental change? Most people accept that literature can be closely connected to places. Whether it is Dickens’s London or Hardy’s Wessex, we also accept that imaginative works deliver something about the nature of place that does not necessarily come to us by any other means.' (Introduction)

1 Park/Plaque Tony Hughes-d'Aeth , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , August no. 393 2017; (p. 35)

'When a new novel from Kim Scott appears, one feels compelled to talk not only about it as a work of fiction by a leading Australian writer, but also about its cultural significance. In this sense a Kim Scott novel is an event, and Taboo does not disappoint.' (Introduction)

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