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Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt By Tony Hughes-D'Aeth UWAP, 520pp, 2017
Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity By Brigid Rooney Anthem, 250pp, 2018
Reviewed by Meg Brayshaw
IN HIS LANDMARK WORK OF SPATIAL HISTORY THE ROAD TO BOTANY BAY (1988), PAUL Carter delineates the close relationship between Australian space and language. The modern settler nation was inaugurated not only through the invaders' physical presence but also their assertion of linguistic control through written documentation. Accordingly, space, place and land often frame investigations of settler Australian literature and culture. Despite this, however, the transnational fervour for place-based literary studies and literary geography has not produced an abundance of site-specific critical monographs on place in Australian literature. In this context, Tony Hughes-d'Aeth's Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017) and Brigid Rooney's Suburban Space, The Novel and Australian Modernity (Anthem, 2018) are significant recent works of Australian scholarship, offering careful and compelling critical investigations of the complex meaning-making relations of space, place and text.
In form and function, wheatbelt and suburb are very different spaces, and they structure monographs of different approach and scope. Roughly seventy per cent of the Australian population lives in the suburbs, but suburbia is difficult to define and locate definitively on a map (Aidan Davison). In her study, Rooney considers representations of specific Australian suburbs and 'suburbia' as a frame of reference and an ideology. The West Australian wheatbelt, on the other hand, is bounded space of specific geographic co-ordinates, and Hughes-d'Aeth begins his book with a satellite image of the continent's southwest that shows starkly the wheatbelt's enormous reach. Hughes-d'Aeth makes use of an 'event/witness' model; for him, the wheatbelt is best understood as a single event; his chosen writers are witnesses whose work illuminates the singularity of the wheatbelt's history, geography and most importantly for Hughes-d'Aeth, its enormous ecological impact. The study considers a wide range of forms and modes, from letters and diaries, to poetry and newspaper columns, nature writing and the novel, attending to how each writer's portrayal of the wheatbelt is mediated by generic perspective.
Rooney is exclusively interested in the novel, and novel-suburb as a 'nexus of cultural significance' (9). She begins by...