Dear Tayyeb Shah,
We are writing to you as members of the judging panel for the 2017-18 Walter McRae Russell Award, to express our dismay at the shocking developments reported this week in relation to UWAP. No doubt you have been inundated with objections to this decision from a range of perspectives but we would like to add our voice to the chorus. The Walter McRae Russel Award is given biennially to the best book of literary scholarship on an Australian subject published in the previous two years. While UWAP under Professor Terri-Ann White’s inspired leadership has published many brilliant creative and scholarly works, and has been instrumental in expanding First Nations’ literary voices, we wish to focus on the book that won the Walter McRae Russell Award in 2019, Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheat Belt. Hughes d’Aeth was awarded this prize from an extremely competitive field of books published both in Australia and internationally by prestigious presses. Our judges’ report noted: Tony Hughes d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt is a hugely impressive achievement: original, ambitious, and beautifully written. It is a work of compelling scholarship, at once tightly focused on the writing of one region and capacious in the breadth and scope of connections and associations that it draws between that writing and the literature of Australia. It provides significant new perspectives on the texts that are its special focus but also on the practice of literary reading in a national context. The book makes a persuasive argument for the complexity of what it calls the “event” of the Wheatbelt – a process that it argues is both “gradual” and “natural,” taking place over generations” and also, in the context of “the deep time of ecological history,” a “sudden and spectacular” occurrence; an index to human construction as well as “radical disappearance”. This complexity is evidenced through the work of a number of writers, well-known and obscure, who lived around and wrote about the Wheatbelt. It reads human creativity as an index to place while expanding and enriching our understanding of what we mean by place, and, most particularly, of what this place, the Wheatbelt, is and has been. In our view, this is a work of global significance that places Western Australian at the centre of the growing and vital field of the environmental humanities. It expands our understanding of the intimate relationship between regional and global histories, and the centrality of literary language to our felt understanding of these histories. Yet it is hard to imagine that it could have been published by any other publisher. Indeed, UWAP was its rightful home. Our concern is that, if UWA proceeds with this ill-thought-out decision to close its press, books like this may no longer find the audience they deserve. It is a distinctively West Australian work though one with global relevance and implications. We would like to express our strong support of UWAP and hope you will recognise its enormous significance in the Australian literary studies landscape. We implore you to reconsider this decision in the light of the damage it will do to the vibrancy of Australian literary culture. Professor Emerita Elizabeth Webby AM FAHA, University of Sydney Professor Brigitta Olubas, University of NSW Dr Marguerite Nolan, Australian Catholic University Comments are closed.
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