On Wednesday 15 September 2021, the Climate Change Communication and Narratives Network was joined by Professor Tony-Hughes-d’Aeth as part of our ongoing lecture series on Australian climate literature.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth offered some observations about the qualities that define Australian fiction in the Anthropocene. He focused on novels by Richard Flanagan, Jennifer Mills, Alexis Wright, Ellen van Neerven, Tara June Winch, Claire G. Coleman, Donna Mazza, James Bradley and Laura Jean McKay. He worked from the idea that the Anthropocene represents a limit and that fictions that address the Anthropocene express the qualities of that limit.
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia. His books include Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017), which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship, and Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (MUP, 2001), which won the Ernest Scott and WK Hancock prizes for Australian history.
You can watch a recording of the presentation below.