This autobiographical novel was written over a ten year period. It is a collection of five interlinked essays where Hughes' describes his relationship with the Ukraine heritage of his mother and grandfather and his childhood experience of growing up as a second generation Australian. The essays are also about how the idea of Europe he developed as a young man clashed with the reality he found in Cambridge and when he travelled though Europe.

Hughes was born in Cessnock, NSW to a father of Welsh descent, and a mother who was of Ukrainian descent. Hughes states that as a second generation Australian he, "lived in two worlds as a child": one world the routine, real world of Cessnock and the second the exotic foreign world of his European family's past. The sense that he was 'foreign' became central to his sense of self. He felt connected to an imagined past of his grandparents. As a child stories were told to him of how his grandparents fled Kiev during the Second World War and had walked on foot across Europe to Naples. From Naples, they emigrated to Australia. The text in "The Idea Of Home" is devoted to the stories of this journey passed down from Hughes' grandfather, and their impact on a young John Hughes.

Hughes undertook a medical degree, but shortly realised it was not for him. He switched to an undergraduate arts degree at Newcastle University in the late 1970s , and at the end of his Honours year, was offered the Shell Scholarship to Cambridge. His preconceived notions of Europe as a place vastly more sophisticated than his provincial Cessnock prompted him to go. However, as he spent more time in England, and struggled through a PhD on Coleridge, he realised that his ideas were wrong, and that provincialism was, if not as obvious, certainly still as potent in what was considered the centre of the academic world. After this, he gave up his "life of letters", as he called it, and returned to Australia.

Back in Sydney, he unsuccessfully tried to teach at his old university, Newcastle, but his failure at Cambridge haunted him. He did, however, complete a PhD thesis at UTS, called "Memory and Forgetting". Hughes now teaches at Sydney Grammar School, where he is Senior Master in English and Senior Librarian. He took a position in the English Department of Sydney Grammar in 1995, under Townsend, who was soon replaced by one of Hughes' colleagues at Cambridge, Dr. John Vallance, as Headmaster.

Hughes has been published in HEAT Magazine, edited by Ivor Indyk, and runs Sydney Grammar's Creative Writing Group.

Books

• The Idea of Home: Autobiographical Essays (Giramondo, 2004) ISBN 1-920882-04-9
• Someone else: fictional essays (Giramondo Pub. for the Writing & Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney, 2007) ISBN 9781920882259

Journal Articles

Plays

• Untitled:A Play in Three Acts, written and directed by John Hughes: performed at the Asian Music and Dance Festival at the Studio at Sydney Opera House in 2002 SMH Review (August 19 2002)