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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'A key to unlock the heart of the country.
'This is the story of a quest - a journey down the red highway.
'On returning from a war zone, Nicolas Rothwell begins to explore the deserts and towns, sleepy coastline and hidden worlds of Australia's north. As he travels, his journey gathers momentum and finds a shape. He has unforgettable, even mystical encounters: with a nun, an explorer, a collector and a hunter. It becomes a quest - for knowledge and a sense of home - that builds to a stunning culmination.
'... The Red Highway ... explores death, friendship, travel and art, and evokes a unique and mesmerising part of the country.' (Publisher's blurb)
Notes
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Dedication: For AA
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Epigraph: omnia tu nostrae tempora laetitiae
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Ethics of Representation and Self-reflexivity : Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative Essays
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 20 no. 2 2020;'While many contemporary Australian writers pitch their narratives on the coastal fringes, where most Australians reside, Nicolas Rothwell returns obsessively to the interior where one senses a sense of unfinished business. The spatial instabilities that resulted from the settler colonial project act as a catalyst for unsettling prior forms of knowledge and belief. Rothwell’s works feature real-and-imagined characters caught between fiction and non-fiction, the lies in the land and the lie of the land. His narratives create a form of generic disorientation that has a political, social and epistemological purpose. Central to Rothwell’s literary project is the reminder that spatial representations influence spatial practices. The author advocates for a break from the novelistic tradition; the country has seen enough literary and legal fictions that had catastrophic consequences for the native population and the environment.
'I argue that Rothwell’s spatial and literary renegotiations culminate in the formation of a new literary genre, the narrative essay. The author decolonises place, space and literary forms to articulate ethical models of non-belonging. Rothwell offers a transformative sublime aesthetics that I analyse as an expression of Bill Ashcroft’s ‘horizonal sublime’ and Christopher Hitt’s ‘ecological sublime’. I compare Rothwell’s ethics of representation, characterised by a self-reflexive prose, narrative instability and narrative regression, to that of Anglo-German author W.G. Sebald, who uses similar techniques in his evocation of a ruined Europe. Rothwell not only presents man’s propensity for a ‘Natural History of Destruction’, he is also intent on identifying the mechanisms at work in building the future.' (Publication abstract)
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Ground Zero : Nicholas Rothwell's Natural History of Destruction
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Studies in Travel Writing , June vol. 15 no. 2 2011; (p. 177-188) 'In Wings of the Kite-Hawk (2003) and The Red Highway (2009), Australian travel writer Nicholas Rothwell describes his visits to a series of archives - libraries, memorials, history and natural history collections, art galleries, and antiquarian bookshops - in his quest for evidence of the great catastrophes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: these include the ongoing contact between European and Aboriginal Australia, the apparent extinction of traditional Aboriginal languages and cultures, desertification and the mass extinction of species, and that great engine of twentieth-century destruction and dispersal, the Second World War. In this paper I examine the role of the archive in Rothwell's writing by comparison with the work of German-born novelist, W.G. Sebald. In The Rings of Saturn (trans. 1998), Sebald uses the image of debris held in Saturn's gravitational field as a metaphor of the evidence of historical catastrophe, especially the great caesura of the Second World War and the Holocaust. In comparing Sebald and Rothwell, I examine Rothwell's sense of history: are the Second World War and the European colonisation of Australia singular events or part of an ongoing 'natural history of destruction'? In examining the ethical implications of comparing these historical traumas, the article draws upon Dominick LaCapra's distinction between absence and loss, which has been influential both in work on the Holocaust and on reconciliation and the Stolen Generations in Australia.' (Author's abstract) -
Into the Shadowed Heart
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Monthly , August no. 48 2009; (p. 48-53)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Faux Sublime
2009
single work
correspondence
— Appears in: The Australian Literary Review , September vol. 4 no. 8 2009; (p. 26) -
Untitled
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: Overland , Spring no. 196 2009; (p. 32)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose
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Roadhouse Poets Too Good To Be True
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Australian Literary Review , May vol. 4 no. 4 2009; (p. 16-17)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Whitmanesque Journeyer
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , May no. 311 2009; (p. 19-20)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Quest That Goes Beyond the Outback Cliches
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Sydney Morning Herald , 9-10 May 2009; (p. 28-29) The Age , 9 May 2009; (p. 25)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Meandering Journey a Beguiling Search for the Nation's Spirit
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 23-24 May 2009; (p. 10-11)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Untitled
2009
single work
review
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 6 June 2009; (p. 26)
— Review of The Red Highway 2009 single work prose -
Appointment with the Sublime
2009
single work
criticism
— Appears in: The Australian Literary Review , August vol. 4 no. 7 2009; (p. 8-9) In response to Peter Cochrane's review of Nicolas Rothwell's The Red Highway, Peter Craven defends and applauds Rothwell's writing style. Rothwell 'is a remarkable writer,' says Craven, 'and he has the exorbitant pretentiousness that goes with everything that is exquisite and mandarin and expectant about his whole endeavour'. -
True North
David Cohen
(interviewer),
2009
single work
interview
— Appears in: Bookseller + Publisher Magazine , May/June vol. 88 no. 8 2009; (p. 35) -
Faux Sublime
2009
single work
correspondence
— Appears in: The Australian Literary Review , September vol. 4 no. 8 2009; (p. 26) -
Ground Zero : Nicholas Rothwell's Natural History of Destruction
2011
single work
criticism
— Appears in: Studies in Travel Writing , June vol. 15 no. 2 2011; (p. 177-188) 'In Wings of the Kite-Hawk (2003) and The Red Highway (2009), Australian travel writer Nicholas Rothwell describes his visits to a series of archives - libraries, memorials, history and natural history collections, art galleries, and antiquarian bookshops - in his quest for evidence of the great catastrophes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: these include the ongoing contact between European and Aboriginal Australia, the apparent extinction of traditional Aboriginal languages and cultures, desertification and the mass extinction of species, and that great engine of twentieth-century destruction and dispersal, the Second World War. In this paper I examine the role of the archive in Rothwell's writing by comparison with the work of German-born novelist, W.G. Sebald. In The Rings of Saturn (trans. 1998), Sebald uses the image of debris held in Saturn's gravitational field as a metaphor of the evidence of historical catastrophe, especially the great caesura of the Second World War and the Holocaust. In comparing Sebald and Rothwell, I examine Rothwell's sense of history: are the Second World War and the European colonisation of Australia singular events or part of an ongoing 'natural history of destruction'? In examining the ethical implications of comparing these historical traumas, the article draws upon Dominick LaCapra's distinction between absence and loss, which has been influential both in work on the Holocaust and on reconciliation and the Stolen Generations in Australia.' (Author's abstract) -
Ethics of Representation and Self-reflexivity : Nicolas Rothwell’s Narrative Essays
2020
single work
criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 20 no. 2 2020;'While many contemporary Australian writers pitch their narratives on the coastal fringes, where most Australians reside, Nicolas Rothwell returns obsessively to the interior where one senses a sense of unfinished business. The spatial instabilities that resulted from the settler colonial project act as a catalyst for unsettling prior forms of knowledge and belief. Rothwell’s works feature real-and-imagined characters caught between fiction and non-fiction, the lies in the land and the lie of the land. His narratives create a form of generic disorientation that has a political, social and epistemological purpose. Central to Rothwell’s literary project is the reminder that spatial representations influence spatial practices. The author advocates for a break from the novelistic tradition; the country has seen enough literary and legal fictions that had catastrophic consequences for the native population and the environment.
'I argue that Rothwell’s spatial and literary renegotiations culminate in the formation of a new literary genre, the narrative essay. The author decolonises place, space and literary forms to articulate ethical models of non-belonging. Rothwell offers a transformative sublime aesthetics that I analyse as an expression of Bill Ashcroft’s ‘horizonal sublime’ and Christopher Hitt’s ‘ecological sublime’. I compare Rothwell’s ethics of representation, characterised by a self-reflexive prose, narrative instability and narrative regression, to that of Anglo-German author W.G. Sebald, who uses similar techniques in his evocation of a ruined Europe. Rothwell not only presents man’s propensity for a ‘Natural History of Destruction’, he is also intent on identifying the mechanisms at work in building the future.' (Publication abstract)
Awards
- 2012 shortlisted The National Year of Reading 2012 Our Story Collection — Northern Territory
- 2010 shortlisted Territory Read Book of the Year
- 2009 shortlisted The Age Book of the Year Award — Non-Fiction Prize
- Northern Territory,
- North Western Australia, Western Australia,