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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

John Hughes was once hailed as a young Australian literary genius and won a scholarship to Cambridge.

But Hughes found himself back in Australia working as the Librarian and a teacher at the elite private school Sydney Grammar, before his writing found acclaim.

He ended up shortlisted for some of the greatest honours in Australian writing, but under the scrutiny of greater acclaim, a strange web of inconsistencies, borrowing and copying struck one reader: Anna Verney.

Today, writer Anna Verney and contributing editor to The Monthly Richard Cooke, on how they first discovered the borrowings of John Hughes and the revelations that followed.

It’s Thursday, March 15.

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RUBY:

So Anna and Ritchie, welcome to 7am. It's great to have you on.

RITCHIE:

Thank you.

ANNA:

Thanks, Ruby.

RUBY:

So Anna, you were the first person to uncover John Hughes' plagiarism, and it seems like you stumbled onto this almost by accident, can you tell me where it all began for you?

ANNA:

Yeah, absolutely. I picked up a copy of The Dogs to read in early 2022, and when I read it, I was heavily pregnant. And in The Dogs there is this central scene that is incredibly shocking. In it, the protagonist's mother, she's fighting the German army in World War Two. She's a partisan, hiding in a swamp with her unit. And in this scene, she's forced to murder her baby daughter by holding her under the swamp and drowning her.

John Hughes -- The Dogs:

“Someone betrayed us. We were saved by the swamps. For days we stood up to our necks. Mud and water. The baby was hungry. But she was hungry too and had little milk.”

ANNA:

And when I read it, I was just incredibly shocked and found it really powerful in its horror. Shortly afterwards, a month and a half later, I picked up a copy of Svetlana Alexievich’s ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’. It's a collection of oral histories of Soviet women who fought in World War Two. And as I was reading the foreword, I had this incredible sense of deja vu that I was reading a scene in which a woman describes watching another partisan drown her own baby in a swamp while hiding from the German army.

Svetlana Alexievich -- The Unwomanly Face of War:

“Somebody betrayed us. We were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces didn’t go. For days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. The baby was hungry … It had to be nursed … But the mother herself was hungry and had no milk.”

ANNA:

I immediately ran to get John Hughes's book ‘The Dogs’ and compare them side by side. And the similarities between them were very striking.

(The above excerpts from ‘The Dogs’ and ‘The Unwomanly Face of War’ read together.)

RUBY:

And Ritchie, when Anna told you about this, about the similarities that she’d come across between The Dogs and The Unwomanly Face of War, what did you make of it?

RITCHIE:

What are the chances of all the millions of books in the world? That someone like Anna should read The Dogs by John Hughes and The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich in a row while she is thinking about pregnancy. Her name is Anna, the same as the woman in the book. And these are the two kind of, the key and the lock, that unlocks this years long practice of cribbing and kidnapping from other people's work.

RUBY:

And how did you come to be working together on the story?

RITCHIE:

So Anna and I had known each other for a while, we were sort of, you know, in touch about her work and mine. And when she first read the Alexievich examples, there was this real sense that there was going to be more. You know, we said right from the very beginning, people who do this very rarely do it once.

And, to some extent we anticipated some resistance, you know, if you look at prior literary scandals in Australia, what tends to happen is that at the beginning, the publishing companies will say ‘nothing’s wrong, this person is someone of the utmost integrity.’ But at the same time, they won’t actually ask them direct questions about it, it’s interesting. This same pattern kind of played out in the past and it’s played out this time, that it’s almost a precondition to be a published writer that people don’t expect you to do things like this.

So then it became about the forensics, about collating this material. And people think that it's just, you know, a matter of feeding it into software. And it's really not like that. It's extremely time consuming. There's a lot of informed guesswork, a lot of detective work. And, you know, Anna has incredible ability in that regard.

RUBY:

And so Anna, as you’re realising that these two bits of text are extremely similar, what did you actually know about John Hughes? I mean, obviously you had his book, but how much did you know about his image and his public reputation as a writer?

ANNA:

Look, I knew a little. I had been given The Dogs after it was reviewed very effusively on a Radio National programme as ‘one of the great Australian contemporary novels’. And as I did a little bit more research into John Hughes and his writing, I could see that he had written, for example, an article in which he described The Dogs as being founded upon some of his family experience. His grandparents were Ukrainian and came to Australia after World War Two, and he’d said that some of the book was based upon his grandmother telling me about her own experiences in World War Two. In addition to that, as I did a little bit more research, I could see that he gained a significant amount of critical acclaim over the course of his writing career.

RUBY:

Okay. And so once you had these two texts in front of you and you'd notice the similarities, tell me about what happened next.

ANNA:

So I kept on reading through Alexievich, and as I kept on reading, further passages stood out to me as having been in The Dogs. And I would go and check between Alexievich and The Dogs. And ultimately, I found about nine sections, nine scenes between the two books that Hughes had taken from Alexievich. After that, I decided that I should get in touch with Mr. Hughes's publisher, Upswell Publishing. I took photographs of all of the scenes, and sent them across to Upswell Publishing and let them know about these really striking similarities between the books.

RUBY:

And so what did John Hughes and his publisher have to say about it?

ANNA:

Initially, I didn't hear from John Hughes. John Hughes's publisher, Terri-Ann White at Upswell Publishing, wrote back to me. She acknowledged that a reader might be alarmed by the similarities between John Hughes's book and the Alexievich’s, but she was convinced, without having spoken to John, that John would not have copied directly from Alexievich’s book. Instead, she said that she was struck by the universality of experience in war and suffering, that the similarities revealed.

RUBY:

What did you think of that?

ANNA:

It didn't strike me as a particularly convincing response.

Several months later, I saw that The Dogs had been nominated for the New South Wales Premier's Literary Award and that it had been shortlisted, and I checked to see whether any attributions or acknowledgements had been appended to the book, perhaps on the website. And on seeing that they hadn't I really decided this is really newsworthy. I'm going to write about this.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

So Anna, last year you wrote a news story, which was all about the similarities that you’d uncovered in a passage in the celebrated Australian book The Dogs, by John Hughes, and this separate work by Svetlana Alexievich, who is a Belarusian journalist and author. And at this point, John Hughes actually responded to the claims of plagiarism, didn’t he? What was his explanation?

ANNA:

Yeah. So John responded in the piece that I published. And initially he said that the similarities with the Alexievich book were a result of an accident. He had mixed up passages from the Alexievich that he had taught with transcripts of his grandparents’ accounts of their time during World War Two. And yeah, basically, he said that this was all the result of a mix up, and he apologised to Svetlana Alexievich for the use of her work unacknowledged.

RUBY:

Okay. So Hughes is admitting that it's been copied, but says that it's this kind of mix up, this simple mistake. And he's apologising to the author, Alexievich. Presumably this is not the first time that a mistake has been made in literature and at this point it seems like maybe that this might blow over, but then we start to hear about more issues in the text. Can you start to outline the other instances of similarities that emerge?

ANNA:

Yeah, absolutely. So after the Alexievich article was published, some literary critics and academics became really interested in The Dogs. Their names were Emmett Stinson and Shannon Burns. They started reading The Dogs and as they did, they started realising that there were further passages from other books. So those included Anna Karenina.

Leo Tolstoy -- Anna Karenina:

“In that brief glance, Vronsky had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her face and fluttered between her shining eyes and the barely noticeable smile that curved her red lips. It was as if a surplus of something so overflowed her being that it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

John Hughes -- The Dogs:

“In that brief assessment I had time to notice the restrained animation that played over her features, and knew at once what drew my mother to her. It was as if some surplus so overflowed her it expressed itself beyond her will, now in the brightness of her glance, now in her smile.”

ANNA:

The Great Gatsby, All Quiet on the Western Front.

Erich Maria Remarque -- All Quiet on the Western Front:

“Haie Westhus is carried off with his back torn open; you can see the lung throbbing through the wound with every breath he takes”…

Erich Maria Remarque -- All Quiet on the Western Front:

“We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away..."

John Hughes -- The Dogs:

“She saw a man carried off with his back torn open, the lung throbbing through the wound.”

“She saw men go on living with the top of their skulls missing. She saw soldiers go on running when both their feet had been shot away.”

ANNA:

Richard and I went away and did months of work pulling on the threads in John Hughes's work to see how much else was in there, if there was further material in there. And what we came away with and have published in The Monthly is really, truly extraordinary.

The Dogs is a 300 odd page novel, and when Richard and I put all the borrowings from other books into a table comparing them with the dogs, our table amounted to 170 pages long, and we actually weren't able to put all the sources we found in there because it was getting too laborious for us to do.

RUBY:

Wow, ok. And so what does Hughes say as these kinds of revelations come out?

ANNA:

So, I guess it’s not just a light borrowing here or there, it’s really a significant amount of taking from other sources.

So John wrote a long essay in The Guardian called ‘I am not a plagiarist, and here's why.’ In the essay, he said he compared his writing style to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Dickens and Kafka, among others. This time, John's defence changed. This time it wasn't the result of a mix up. He said that this was actually the way he works as a writer, that he commonly uses the work of other writers in his own. And he said that he didn't really think of what he was doing as plagiarism. It was more a question of influence.

RUBY:

Right, and so…Ritchie if I can come back to you here, Hughes first says that he’s mistakenly copied someone else’s work into his book, but then as all these other examples start to come out, he says that in these cases it’s actually intentional - this is how he works, this is part of his process. So, can you tell me a bit more about what he means when he says that? And how plausible it is that this was actually an intentional artistic choice as a writer?

RITCHIE:

I mean, so John Hughes starts off with this kind of ‘dog ate my homework excuse’ about getting his notes mixed up. He's taken all these notes from the Alexievich novel. He's taught them in class, and he has confused them with interview transcripts from his Ukrainian grandparents. That is possible, I guess, but a few things make it more unlikely. He taught the material relatively recently. The Alexievich had only been translated into English relatively recently, and the interviews had been conducted some time ago. So he was asking people to have faith that he had confused material that he was teaching in the last couple of years before writing with stuff that was, you know, up to a decade old. So it was already teetering on the brink of the implausible. And I think the intertextual excuses really pushed it over.

RUBY:

Okay. So you're saying then, I suppose, that there isn't really much merit to the idea that what Hughes was actually doing would count as this kind of intertextual approach? It's closer to plagiarism.

RITCHIE:

Yeah. I mean, there's always a continuum between an intertextual approach and plagiarism. But we know that John Hughes knew the difference between these things. He wrote about them. He put acknowledgements in his books that showed that he understood that material was copyright and how he should use that, why he and the people around him decided to drop those attributions is one of the mysteries of this story still to us.

ANNA:

Yeah, so John was really locating his work in the tradition of intertextuality. He referenced, for example, the poet T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, which is a poem made up of other other sources. And I think when we look at John's defence, we can see that over time, historically he had worked as a writer intertextually himself. But when he started with this intertextuality, he had previously used attributions and acknowledgements of other sources that he was working with by including bibliographies in his work. So some things had switched between his early work and The Dogs in which he didn't use any attributions or acknowledgements.

RUBY:

And so, Ritchie, when you think about John Hughes – and the circumstances that he was in, he was this teacher at an elite private school in Sydney for a long time and had come to be quite celebrated among a certain part of the Australian literary world. So, to what extent do you think that his position actually, I suppose, enabled this to happen and allowed him to get away with this for so long?

RITCHIE:

We get a strong sense from people around Grammar that John Hughes was kind of on light duties as a teacher, that this is a guy who's given a lot of time semi-officially to write on school time, he's given a healthy salary, he's even given adjunct work writing stuff for arts festivals. And it is sometimes easy to think, well, what could someone else have done with that? That situation's pretty rare for a writer now. But one thing that we sort of sense throughout this story is that the literary world in Australia’s unfortunately small and it's getting smaller. Its resourcing is poor, the average salary that these kinds of authors make is dropping, and that means that it feels besieged. It's not a pleasant place to work. Publishing has very, very high rates of mental illness. And one of the ways that it deals with these conditions is solidarity. People look out for each other. They may not be getting wide readerships but they are getting peer accolades and sometimes those take the form of awards. So to step out of that circle and break it and to say this person has done something wrong can be quite difficult because you don't know whether you're going to be penalised for that sort of behaviour.

The other aspect is that with a literary novel like this in Australia and which doesn't have a massive amount of cut through, there just aren't that many people reading it overall, there aren't that many eyeballs going over it to detect things like this.

RUBY:

And so where does all of this leave Hughes now? What happens to his legacy and the books that he's written in the way that he's seen, I suppose, in the Australian literary canon?

RITCHIE:

So Joseph Earp, who is a writer and a former student of John Hughes and someone who Hughes plagiarised from directly, wrote about this, and he said that from this moment on, John Hughes’ name will always be associated with plagiarism, that when there's a book review that comes out of his next book, if another book does come out, that's going to be the first thing that it mentions. So it's hard to understand how someone who is clearly so fixated on legacy and genius and being part of a conversation with previous literary greats, especially in Europe, thought that this would play out. I don't really know what he thought was going to happen when this came to light. Perhaps he was betting on the fact that it wouldn't or that this kind of intertextual mode would excuse or explain all of the ways that he had written.

RUBY:

And I know Anna that you’ve actually, you have gone and looked at other literary scandals of the past. You've spoken to academics and researchers to try and I suppose answer the question of how exactly to label what it is that John Hughes has done here. So how does it compare? If you look at the level of, quote unquote, borrowing in Hughes's work, how does that compare against other kinds of literary scandals?

ANNA:

Yeah, really, it's quite extraordinary… It seems that we have chanced upon one of the great cases of literary plagiarism.

In the process of writing our story, we were hard pressed to find any example of plagiarism of the scale that we found in The Dogs and across the rest of Hughes's work.

RUBY:

Anna, Ritchie, thank you both so much for your time.

ANNA:

Thanks, Ruby.

RITCHIE:

Thanks.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

Details of the AUKUS deal have officially been unveiled in a joint announcement from US President Joe Biden, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The deal, which will cost Australia an estimated $368 billion, marks the single biggest investment in Australia’s defence capability.

Australia is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but will be the first country to invoke a loophole in the treaty which allows for nuclear energy to be used as fuel.

AND

After months of speculation, the Bureau of Meteorology has formally announced that La Nina is over.

This ends the third La Nina in a row, which saw record-breaking rain and flooding in Australia and the Pacific.

Current modelling points to a potential El Nino forming later in the year, which brings drier and hotter conditions.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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