Hard surfaces

Two or three weeks ago I was trying to figure out whether I had any useful questions to ask about the cancellation of Adelaide Writers' Week. I was thinking that I would set aside some time to work through the parallel proliferation of literary newsletters and narrowing of edited cultural media, now that I've been writing a sort-of literary newsletter on and off for two years, but the scandals kept rolling out of Adelaide. Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah's invitation to the event was retracted, moments later the Adelaide Festival board issued an insulting and garbled statement about cultural sensitivity. It quickly became clear that the staff of AWW, and in particular the director Louise Adler, opposed withdrawing the invitation to Abdel-Fattah, both because they'd invited her to Adelaide in the first place, and wanted her to speak, and because they, unlike the board, understood what was at stake for the organisation in withdrawing the invitation. It was startling to see such a stark failure of both principle and pragmatism from the board of one of the country's most respected cultural institutions. Peter Malinauskas, the extremely popular state premier, tried very hard to explain.

Most of the writers programmed to speak at the 2026 festival withdrew, and I was surprised by how many big names joined the boycott, and how quickly. Malinauskas dug in, cried on camera, talked too much, so much that he's now party to a defamation suit. Louise Adler resigned. Boycotting writers wrote newsletters and social media threads affirming their support for freedom of expression, and mostly for Randa Abdel-Fattah too. (When I get around to writing about the Substackification of literary discourse, there are plenty of case studies.) Abdel-Fattah's name was smeared in uncounted op-eds published by News Ltd and the Nine Media group. All this is well-established, old news, actually.

The timeline starts to get a bit blurry around this point for me, because I fell off my bike and wound up with a concussion. I couldn't connect a thing. Upright now, finally, I've given myself an exemption on health grounds from reading every single word written about Adelaide Writers' Week. Trying to pick through the pieces in the aftermath, though, is unpleasantly similar to the baffled, squinting experience of performing basic tasks while recovering from a concussion. This can't be right, can it, is the question I now find myself asking. A lingering cognitive delay means I have to pause for a moment to recall some of the events of the past twelve or so months: the retraction of Khaled Sabsabi's Biennale invitation, the code of conduct debacle at the Bendigo Writers Festival, Antoinette Lattouf getting sacked, a whole string of debacles. The extent of the damage that has been done to our cultural institutions in the past twelve months in the name of silencing critics of genocide hasn't really sunk in. Is this for real? Did an SA State Premier actually just nuke the Adelaide Writers' Week in toto to stop a Palestinian-Australian writer from voicing criticisms of Israel? Wasn't it George Brandis who threw a tantrum over artists boycotting the Transfield-sponsored Biennale a decade ago? Don't Labor governments with big majorities, state and federal, stand against exactly this kind of thing? Does anyone seriously believe the unraveling of this episode will serve to remedy either the anti-semitism or the Islamophobia that are repulsive fixtures of Australian public life? (And did I hallucinate that bit in the poem by Kate Llewellyn that likened Adler's approach to programming AWW to a mother deciding to feed vegan food to a baby? I didn't: "The child wasn't well. You had/ decided vegan food was what you wanted/ for it. / Tears and loss of weight/were the result...")

As I rested, Adelaide Writers Week was cancelled, a new Adelaide Festival board was convened, more op-eds and newsletters were published, and finally the new board, a board that was able to tick the arts governance boxes on the skills matrix, carefully apologised and invited Randa Abdel-Fattah to speak at the 2027 AWW. News that Abdel-Fattah lobbied to have Thomas Friedman removed from the 2023 program and that Adler complied was reported as evidence of unconscionable hypocrisy. Good souls in Adelaide have built their own guerilla festival. Meanwhile, hate speech laws were rushed through parliament, the Coalition imploded, One Nation is up in the polls, and Scott fucking Morrison is dialling in from Jerusalem to opine on Islam in Australia. ICE has been tearing up Minneapolis. Davos, Carney, Greenland, shark attacks. A bomb thrown at an Invasion Day rally. More Hanson, Hanson everywhere. I tried to stay off my phone but the news kept getting through.

Had I not knocked my head, I probably would have taken the time to compare the AWW mess with the quote-unquote cancellation of the literary journal Verity La in 2020, a cause célèbre for those who believe an incredibly powerful woke culturati is on a rampage. This would have been an opportunity to reflect on the cancel culture panic promulgated by the Murdoch media, and maybe to take a few potshots at the commentators who insist, contra all available evidence, that the woke hold all the cards. (I reviewed Adrian Daub's excellent book on this topic, The Cancel Culture Panic, for ABR last year, and recommend it.) I decided not to bother when I discovered that Verity La, which has reinvented itself as Verity La La, had the task in hand (sort of). They issued an episode of their Unpersoned podcast notionally devoted to the ways in which the collapse of AWW revealed the censoriousness of the literary left. It's probably the result of my recent mild brain injury, but I couldn't figure out whether this podcast was a scathing parody or self-indicting nonsense, and because it's almost two hours long, I had to abandon it.

Then there was Jason Koutsoukis' Saturday Paper exposé of the true story behind the cancellation of AWW. His reporting pins the blame for the festival's collapse on Louise Adler. He concludes, 'Stripped of rhetoric, what the Adelaide Writers’ Week collapse reveals is a failure of governance more than a triumph of principle.' Koutsoukis is a serious political reporter, so it was jarring to encounter in his article references to letters to The Australian authored by Morry Schwartz; 'In January 2023, The Australian published a letter from Morry Schwartz, owner of this newspaper, calling for Adler’s resignation and at the same time urging writers to continue participating in the festival'; 'Morry Schwartz again wrote a letter to The Australian, blaming Adler for the festival’s collapse.' Is this for real? I mean, if you own your own media organisation and your journalists write stories that align with your position, why bother writing a piddling letter to the editor of The Australian? I had to read this one a few times to make sure I wasn't seeing double. The references to Schwartz' correspondence in the Saturday Paper piece make the conflict of interest explicit, which is a kind of disclosure, I suppose, but they also undermine the credibility of Koutsoukis' conclusion and point to a very depressing failure of editorial independence.

At a birthday party for an eight-year old, a friend who works in local government here in Vancouver asked me what the hell happened in Adelaide. This was my first outing since hitting the concrete, and my answer was not coherent. He was looking for a short answer and I didn't have one. He's a career public servant and I thought he might recognise the category of public figure represented by Louise Adler. I said that I admired Adler, how tough and smart she is, how many beefs she's weathered, how well-connected she is, and tried to convey that if she couldn't defend her program against a centre-left premier, no one else would stand a chance. A little self-conscious and disoriented after all this, what I found myself blurting out next was, have you ever heard of a woman called Pauline Hanson? He hadn't and I soon let go of the conversation, because I couldn't grasp all the threads connecting Hanson and AWW, let along weave them together. We ate some cake, sang happy birthday, and I went home to rest.

I'm still thinking about Hanson, though, and who really benefits from this saga. Certainly not Randa Abdel-Fattah or Louise Adler. Certainly not the hundreds of writers and artsworkers who have lost work. The cancellation of AWW has emphasised once more the vulnerability of publicly funded cultural institutions to powerful lobby groups and populist politics. If the AWW is precarious, so is every other literary organisation in the country. The Albanese government has done little to make good on the promises of Revive, with its objective to deliver 'new momentum' to the cultural sector. No one in the cultural sector can feel assured that politicians and civic leaders will defend the principle of freedom of artistic expression, or indeed the independence of curators and programmers, of editors and prize judges and peer panels. This was not the case before the murders at Bondi, and it still is not. Instead it's Hanson and One Nation who benefit from the the racialised exclusion of people from public life. It's Hanson, with her crude ethnopolitics, whose credibility is bolstered when dangerous stereotypes are allowed to circulate unchecked, as they have these past few weeks. This is no victory for those who wish to understand the vectors of anti-semitism in Australian life, and to eradicate them.

There is great consolation in the solidarity shown by writers in Adelaide, and a new festival rising from the ashes. Still, I can only foresee that this episode will have a chilling effect on cultural programming. It's one thing for an international cohort of writers to boycott a festival when a writer gets scratched from the program. It's quite another for writers to take ethical positions when writers whose positions are controversial, provocative, inflammatory (stock epithets that have been applied to Abdel-Fattah) are simply left off programs. Kerrie O'Brien and Linda Morris' excellent article on festival risk analysis is highly relevant in this context. Everyone commissioning new work, especially with public funding, is on notice about the risks of political comment at their events. The folks preparing programs for literary festivals in Sydney and Melbourne know that their schedules will be subject forensic scrutiny and speculation about their motives. Arts work is already precarious, and the AWW cancellation tips the balance further in favour of highly cautious programming. Not every curator, editor and programmer will be able to withstand board pressure, media pressure, political pressure, not to mention risk their livelihoods and possibly their co-workers', in order to deliver politically engaged programs.

I keep stumbling over the criticism that Adler politicised the writers' festival and in doing so destroyed it, as if literature and politics can be kept separate. A literary festival with no events on the program dealing with Gaza, or colonisation, or anti-semitism or climate change would be just as political as anything Adler has come up with. The longing for a literary culture that is cocooned from the contemporary world strikes me as, at best, childish fantasy, and at worst, disingenuous and reactionary. (And take it from someone who has spent the best part of the last two weeks cocooned in rest mode, avoiding bright lights and screen time, the realisation of this fantasy is unsatisfactory). A literary culture disaggregated from the contemporary world consigns itself to utter irrelevance – and yet in Albanese's Australia, the fantasy of an apolitical cultural sector seems to have been installed as de facto cultural policy.

It's a shame that the cancellation of AWW has generated so much tension, because this week Writing Australia launched an excellent suite of new funding programs. I've made plenty of noise about Writing Australia receiving insufficient funding and I still think it needs much more funding in order to achieve its goals. Nevertheless, these investments, which will build capacity across the sector, are a very encouraging start. I'm also extremely happy to see a Literary Journals Capacity Building Fund in the mix, which responds to recommendations that emerged from the research on literary journals Sam Ryan and I undertook in 2022 and 2023. May everyone's capacity to respond to the contemporary world be enhanced this year.

It's not like literary festivals aren't available for critique. This piece by Diya Isha in The Swaddle, To Attend A Litfest, Kill Your Ambition First, takes as its focus the Jaipur Literary Festival, but travels widely. It takes me back to the good old days when we all got to complain about literary festivals rather than having to defend them:

According to Kumar, these festivals bring together writers “who wouldn’t be caught drinking, or even pissing, together.” To be invited is to have arrived. As much as it is a legitimation exercise for publisher and author alike, the festival also supplies the reader, or the would-be reader, and more often than not the never-reader, with what literary theorist Michael Meehan calls “surrogate literacy.” By this, he means that physical proximity to the creator of a text outdoes the need for the text itself. This tendency is most evident in the rise of the influencer-author, a figure who doggedly churns out content and, incidentally, writes. She becomes an author by way of notoriety, and a bestseller partly because of her hackneyed prose, but overwhelmingly because of her amassed follower tally. Some editors now build their catalogues almost entirely around figures like her. For festival organisers, the presence of an influencer, with her emphatic and tightly consolidated fanbase, guarantees footfall and supplies virtually free publicity.

And finally, a corker of a piece by Lydia Kiesling in The Baffler on the lists of books that proliferate online. 'Sometimes,' she writes, 'the front page of the NYTBR is so festooned with numbers, it looks like a sudoku'.