Ellie Fisher

‘Literature becomes a mode for registering loss’: An interview with Dr Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

ellie fisher greatly admires the works of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

Dr Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is a Professor in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is the Chair of Australian Literature at UWA and the Director of the Westerly Centre. His research places an emphasis on the crosssection between literature, history, and the environment.

Ellie Fisher: To many students at UWA— especially English majors—who have been lucky enough to take your units, you’re seen as a rigorous yet kind academic, capable of going on fruitful tangents and engaging deeply with the wonder of learning. What do you think it takes to be a ‘good’ lecturer?

Dr Tony Hughes-d’Aeth: Those are kind words – I like the emphasis you are placing on ‘wonder’ in this issue of Pelican. I think the first thing a lecturer needs to do is not to kill wonder. That is our Hippocratic Oath. One thing I learned over the years teaching literature, cinema, and television is that a good lecture is not a perfect lecture. I like to keep my lectures a little jagged. If a lecture is too smooth it tends to just sit there – like a nice vase or a Christmas ornament.

I don’t want my students to fall asleep or nod their heads in agreement. The whole point of my lectures is to provoke the right kind of questions in my audience. I want people to think – what does Tony mean by that? The response I’m most looking for is: ‘Surely that can’t be right!’ – followed by a pause and a moment of doubt. It’s a fine line because I don’t want to leave people utterly perplexed either! But I find my own curiosity (my own sense of wonder) is my best and only guide. I look for examples from the texts that are enigmatic, that cannot be readily explained. What I say to my students is – I wonder what that means? That is exactly where we need to start.

EF: You have one foot rooted in history, and the other planted in the literary sphere. How do you bridge these two disciplines, and the original moment which sparked your wonder in these subjects?

THD: That’s a good observation. What I love about literature is the way that it asks questions and the way that it says things and dramatizes things that sit below the surface of the world. I also love language and the way that words can shock, confuse, surprise and delight us. But I am historically-minded in the sense that I tend to want to place things in time. Even when I teach present-day popular culture in ‘Narrative in the Digital Age’ or ‘Netflix: Cinema and Long-form Television’, I treat the present as a historical moment.

I like doing both together – history and literature. I think history helps us understand literature and literature helps us understand history. But I also like using them against each other – to highlight the counterhistorical capacity of literature, and the way that this element of literature brings out the counter-historical dimension of history itself. How even in the most settled histories there are cross-currents and complications – this is why literary texts are fundamentally dramatic.

EF: You were recently appointed Chair of the new board of UWA Publishing. UWAP was under threat of being defunded and closed in

2019, but has returned under the banner of being a hybrid publisher this year. Why is it important for the imprint to continue, and what do you feel you’ll give to your role?

THD: The most heartening thing to emerge from the threat to UWAP’s future was a very strong community reaction. This took place at a national and international level, but most importantly it took place in Western Australia where people, young and old, made it clear that they valued UWAP. I’m delighted that UWA listened and has committed strongly to UWAP, emphasising its importance in telling Western Australian stories, and as a platform for community and scholarly discourse. At our first board meeting we approved four new titles for publication, and we are very much back in business. I think having UWAP is a real asset for our university – it’s one of the ways that people encounter UWA and in a concrete way see what universities can do, particularly in the world of letters and culture, which is a bit of an antidote to lives often lived at the mercy of numbers and dollars. But it was also a lesson for all of us – we need to support the things we love; we need to fight for them.

EF:One of your areas of academic interest is storytelling in the digital age. What is it about the digital wonder/land in which we locate ourselves in the twenty-first century which fascinates you?

THD: While I was doing my PhD in the late 1990s, the internet appeared. There was no grand opening – we don’t celebrate Internet Day each year in memory of this event. In fact, at first it was like, is this it? What even is the internet? The first big change was email, which seems so humble now but radically changed the way we speak and relate to one another. During semester, I get around 30 or 40 work emails a day. Then Google appeared. You might hate Google, but their search engine made the web work properly for the first time – you would type words in and bang you were there. I could have been a historian after all! Then social media happened, and step by step the internet’s emergence completely transformed the world. My seven-year-old son asks Google if it’s going to rain today.

And yet … when I teach ‘Narrative in the Digital Age’ one of our major themes is loneliness and intimacy. It turns out for all its

immediacy and connectivity, the digital age

is one that makes us lonely. If my teaching has an ethical orientation it is to fight for authentic human experience. That sounds absurdly old-fashioned and essentialist, when people are talking about performativity and post-humanism, but there it is. For me, literature (and film and narrative television) are not really about escape, as is sometimes supposed, but about an urgent need to name things that are often not nameable. These stories give our confused interior feelings a dramatic shape.

Another theme that emerged in the texts that I taught this year – TV shows like Wanda Vision and Tales from the Loop, and Charlie Kaufman’s film I’m Thinking of Ending Things – was the glitch. This is an example of how screen dramas are trying to isolate the way that the smoothness of digital technology – the erotic and utopian allure of the latest

iPhone – is haunted by a certain kind of failure. Why is the malfunctioning robot so eerie? These are the kinds of things that fascinate me about the digital age.

EF:You’re the Director of the Westerly Research Group, which is a member of the UWA EcoPeoPle (Ecology, People, Place) research cluster. Can you tell me more about your work in this area— dealing with the Anthropocene, environmental history, and how humans’ relationship with the land is complex and multifaceted?

THD: This is a long-standing interest of mine and comes out in various ways in my professional life. At the level of my research, I have been attracted to the intersection of literature and the environment. Like many things I do, this begins with a sense of contradiction, because literature seems inimical to nature. However many words we pile up, and however beautiful they might be, nature is completely oblivious – like the peahens in the Arts courtyard studious ignoring the peacocks carrying on.

On the other hand, we are wrecking nature and we have to stop – i.e. we are in the Anthropocene and we are causing it. What can literature do? I think that first and foremost literature makes us appreciate what is there beyond us. In that sense literature replicates the otherness of the natural world. I know scientists like to understand things – God knows, I do too – but literature is about appreciating something without mastering it. It’s a different way of knowing.

Along with the environmental historian Dr Andrea Gaynor, I am really excited we are now offering a Minor in Environmental Humanities at UWA – the first of its kind in Western Australia. Andrea created EcoPeoPle at UWA and I admire her work a lot – she’s a brilliant historian. Part of that minor is my unit, ‘Writing the Environment’, and what we do in that unit is look closely at place – and place-based writing. I like to use local examples and the assessment involves a place-writing exercise where students write about a place that is near them – they visit it, they befriend it, and we all know that friendships are complex things …

EF: Your 2017 book, Like Nothing on this Earth, chronicles the history of the wheatbelt. You examine how the wheatbelt was created, not only through intensive clearing and environmentally damaging massive-scale agriculture, but also—perhaps more importantly—through creative writing. What are your thoughts on the importance of language and writing in shaping, understanding and framing landscape, especially in the context of Western Australia?

THD: This book took me a long time to research and write, maybe ten years all up. The main epiphany I had was that the wheatbelt – which looks lovely at this time of year, with its chequerboard of green fields and lacework of residual bush – is not a place but an event. The event was the destruction of 90% of the natural world across a swathe of land the size of Britain and with the biodiversity of a tropical rainforest. This happened in the span of two or three lifetimes during the twentieth century. A century might seem long in human terms but is an eye-blink in deep time.

I treated writers – from Albert Facey to John

Kinsella and from Jack Davis to Barbara York Main – as witnesses to the event of the wheatbelt. In the book, I make the case – my book is the evidence – that literature is able to capture dimensions of this event that are not captured in other ways. Above all, literature becomes a mode for registering loss and a sometimes barely understood confusion about what is happening.

Another important part of this book was that I decided at an early point that I was not writing this book just for other academics. In particular, I wanted it to be read by people who live in or have lived in the wheatbelt. After the book was published I gave talks across the wheatbelt – Northam, Wagin, Toodyay, Moora, York – and I was very humbled by the fact that people had read my 600-page book. They were not always agreeing with the sentiments of the book, and they told me so. But this experience brought home to me that literature did have a unique role – that it can make us see things in new ways, and help us to grapple with truly difficult and tragic things. EF: Do you have any book recommendations which send the reader into wonder/land? What are you currently reading?

THD: I am currently reading Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country, which is an Australian novel about a fictional pandemic. The disease that spreads through the country is called ‘zooflu’ and its most notable symptom is that once infected you become able to understand the thoughts of animals. It is all narrated by a hard-talking, hard-living grandmother who works as a zookeeper. I’m loving it.

I’m also reading a book of poems by the Perth writer, and current UWA student, Emily Sun called Vociferate. It’s fantastic. There is nothing nice about it. It is trying to deal with contradictions. There is quiet rage in the poems as well as a terrible beauty. We hear so many anodyne accounts of how the world is, but what if the world was exactly how it appears in these poems? Broken, writhing, electric.