Thea Stanley Hughes

A name that is largely forgotten now in the annals of Australian literature is Thea Stanley Hughes.
Hughes was an innovator, a feminist, a dancer, a prolific author and proponent of self-help philosophies.
She came to Australia as a teacher of dance, establishing the Women's League of Health, an organisation that taught a style of dance-exercise that was, in many ways, the equivalent of aerobics in 1930s Australia. She was an advocate of the hygienics movement, a popular fad that endorsed clean living, healthful diet (mostly based around vegetarianism) and plenty of exercise and outdoors experience.
She remained an exercise and dance teacher for many years, but slowly she became an author as well. Developing some of the ideas of hygienics, Hughes began to write about the great and the self-reliant who she saw embodied in the explorers of early Australia. She used their biographies as guides to self-help and moral development.




This style of writing had a great pedigree, of course, having been perhaps most successfully done by the original self-help writer Samuel Smiles.
Thea Stanley Hughes moved on to more didactic material that was modelled closely on the conventional self-help books coming out in Australia in the 1970s.
Significantly, Hughes was an Anthroposophist, and most of her writings reflect the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, to a greater or lesser extent. Towards the end of her life she became a quasi-mystical figure and developed something of a cult following. She was involved with the Christian Community, an Anthroposophical offshoot that sought to explore Christianity more deeply.
I am discussing Hughes' work in the current chapter of my thesis, which explores the New Age and the significance of minority religiuous traditions in Australian writing, most notably Theosophy, Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism and, as embodied in Huges, Anthroposophy.