Category Archives: Diary

Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Four

Posted on 2 Jun 2026 | 1 comment

I don’t know how it happened but my only event on the festival’s final day this year was the closing address. Happily, it was at Carriageworks, so didn’t involve a trek to the city. Incidentally, speaking of treks to the city, I’ve been told that since the festival moved from Walsh Bay on the Harbour to Carriageworks on the edge of Newtown, historically home to a large Aboriginal community, the demographics of festival attendees has changed. Now the vast majority are from the Inner West, and very few from the Northern Suburbs or even the East. For the benefit of readers unfamiliar with Sydney’s social geography, this means that broadly speaking the sympathies of the audience skew to the left. (Tony Abbott’s book sold well, all the same.)

Anyhow, I went to 5.45 pm: Closing Address: A Braver Australia.

As in the last couple of years, the closing address was actually a series of six addresses. I don’t imagine that the speakers got together and planned anything, but their takes on the notion of bravery had a huge amount of overlap.

After introductory remarks by the chair of the Festival and its artistic Driector, in which all the necessary thankyous were made, Sisonke Msimang stepped into the role of host. ‘My father was a freedome fighter,’she said by way of positioning herself in relation to the evening’s topic, ‘and my mother was an accountant.’ Her father’s advice was, ‘Don’t start trouble, but if trouble comes to you, finish it.’ We have got plenty of bullies making trouble right now, and it’s time to be brave.

And then the speakers proper.

Amy Remeikis, so strikingly dressed on the Barrie Cassidy and Friends panel, outdid herself in a splendid green frock with huge puffy sleeves falling from her shoulders. She gave an impassioned speech: We have been trained to expect little of our politicians. We’re letting them sleepwalk us off a cliff. It’s time to hold them accountable. She called on us to do the decent thing, the kind thing, the community-responsible thing, and ended to enthusiastic applause: ‘Let’s pull our nickers up!’

Tony Birch struck a different note. Quietly taking the stage, he spoke of the importance of those who have gone before us, who have been our mentors, and talked about Jack Charles as such a person. (If you don’t know who Jack Charles was, I recommend his Wikipedia page.) In prison after years on the edge of society, Jack discovered the pottery wheel and realised you can make something through gentleness. He became a much loved actor, story-teller, and mentor to young Aboriginal men. Tony Birch ended with a story from the set of a verbatim theatre project in Melbourne. The white actor Robert Menzies asked Charles, ‘What is sovereignty?’ I understood him to mean specifically Aboriginal sovereignty. Here’s what I managed to write down of Charles’s reply: ‘Sovereignty is within me. My sovereignty is only as strong as my responsibility. That responsibility extends to all people in my country.’

Amy Thunig-McGregor was next. She picked up Sisonke’s father’s advice. As a child she was told, ‘Don’t hit first, but you are to hit back.’ She focused on the way the important community dimension of media and story consumption is being actively smothered. Not so long ago, we saw diversity of beliefs and opinions play out, not as debate or rage, but as part of being with each other. Now our media consumption is being weaponised against us. ‘Hard yarns can be had,’ she said, ‘and change can be made.’

Jack Toohey, activist and writer of Better Things Are Possible, came to the podium with his face largely obscured by a peaked cap. ‘I’ve got a wedgie, Amy,’ he said. ‘Does that count?’ He told his story of being at the Sydney Town Hall protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit earlier this year. The unprovoked police violence, defended later by the Premier, is symptomatic, he said. We might not always be the targets of state violence, but this doesn’t mean the state is on our side. It’s there to defend power and profit, not people and the planet. He too spoke of the importance of connection: disconnection is how the system works. Solutions to our current problems aren’t to be found in parliament. (I understood him to mean that it’s not enough to vote for someone and feel you’ve done your bit.) We have to connect.

Shankari Chandran said when she was asked to give an address, she did what she always does, wrote five thousand words. (She’s a lawyer.) They were good words and we would have enjoyed them, but then she decided something more personal was needed: ‘What do I need to change about myself in order to be brave?’ And she too spoke about the need for connection and difficult conversations. Bravery is required in places of disagreement, she said. A braver Australia will not be built by louder argument. Listening, really listening, communicating in order to be hear rather than to win – this needs to happen. It might be slow, relentless, exhausting, but it is necessary.

And Ben Quilty was the last speaker. He half apologised for being an artist speaking at a writers’ festival, but gave a fine speech anyhow. He had recently realised that priorities matter. Money can be found for sport – 23 billion dollars for Olympics by some counts. It can be found for Canberra’s War Memorial, the biggest in the world. But not so for art, including literature. To judge by its effects, the priorities for much public spending is to distract and deflect. (I’ve been reading John McDonald’s substack Everything the art world doesn’t want you to know, and though he talks about vast amounts of money that nominally go to art, I think he would agree with Quilty’s point about priorities.) We need art and writing that address the realities that we face, and that takes bravery.

And with that multivocal call for connection, real conversation, respect and accountability, the festival was over. We all went home with our nickers pulled up, at least a little.

I had a thought as I was writing these reports. David Malouf, a wonderful and much loved poet, novelist and essay writer, died recently, and his passing was mentioned a couple of times – at the NSW Literary Awards and in the session on The World According to Trump. How good it would have been to have a whole session to honour him: perhaps a number of people reading favourite poens or passages from this work. Maybe in planning future festivals it wouldn’t be too ghoulish to schedule an In Memoriam session, whose specifics could be organised at the last minute depending on who, if anyone, should die.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on the beautiful land of Gadigal of the Eora Nation. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, a couple of kilometres down the hill. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Three, part 2

Posted on 2 Jun 2026 | 2 comments

Poetry may fill a room at the Carriageworks, but when you get a panel of pundits talking politics, you have to go big. The Sydney Town Hall was packed for both these sessions, one looking at the state of Australia, the other the USA and therefore the planet.

3.15: Barrie Cassidy and Friends: State of the Nation

This session, a kind of spin-off from the TV show The Insiders, is now a regular at the SWF. It may not be as pleasurable as the now defunct Big Read, where a string of writers entertained the audience by reading to us. But there is pleasure in hearing well-informed, thoughtful people talk to each other about the state of politics.

The host was veteran journalist and panel discussion host, Barrie Cassidy. His fans are clearly legion. In the past his panels have been criticised for the absence of people of colour. This year Waleed Aly (who has also garnered a fan base through TV’s The Project and radio show/podcast The Minefield), broke that barrier. Amy Remeikis, who has also built a following from her TV appearances on the now defunct The Drum, improved the visuals of the occasion by sporting a brilliantly coloured flowing garment. Nikki Savva, acerbic chronicler of the conservative side of Australian politics, added a modest touch of colour with a red jacket, while the men were thoroughly drab. Sean Kelly, known to me from his regular writing for The Monthly and most recently a Quarterly Essay (my blog post here), completed the line-up.

The conversation ranged intelligently over the current political landscape.

The apparent collapse of the Liberal Party and virtual extinction of the National Party loomed large. Amy Remeikis preened just a little, saying that she had predicted it, then explained that as a’geriatric millennial’ she understood all too clearly the deep unpoopularity of their policies, especially but not only on housing. Waleed Aly said that for a long time the Nationals had coasted along because they ‘had no natural predators’. But now One Nation has turned up as a party of grievance and put an end to their easy ride. Sean Kelly said the issue isn’t just the rise fo One Nation, but a general volatility in the Australian electorate: One Nation rose from 6 percent to 40 percent of the vote in 20 months; the independent teals took votes from the major parties on the right in the other direction. Someone listed all the functions of the president of the Liberal Party and observed that incoming president Tony Abbott ticks none of the boxes.

Waleed Aly spoke eloquently in defence of the recent budget. Someone said it was bad news for Labor that the Coalition broadly approved of their increase in the capital gains tax – Labor needed a fight to define themselves, but the Coalition have chosen a different tack. The panellists generally agreed that the Murdoch empire’s response to the budget amounted to asking us to pity the poor billionaires.

I enjoyed the discussion, liked all the participants, and came away none the wiser really, but that says more about me than about the panel.

5.30 The World According to Trump

As someone pointed out, this was a panel of non-USers talking about US politics. They were: Canadian David Moscrop, author of Too Dumb for Democracy, who says that Trump has turned him into a reluctant nationalist; Jon Sopel, British journalist who lived in the USA for eight years; Nick Bryant, also British, who hosts a weekly program on the ABC and has written books with titles like When America Stopped Being Great; and facilitator Amelia Lester, deputy editor of the US journal Foreign Policy, who I believe lives in Sydney. (No people of colour – a rarity at this festival.)

Starting from the question, ‘What is it that makes us so interested in Trump, when there are many other erratic, dangerous autocrats in the world?’ the conversation ranged widely and interestingly, from David Moscrop’ rejection of a can of gravy (a can of gravy) because it was made in the US, to John Sopel letting himself off the leash in a diatribe about Trump’s gangsterism and corruption.

Nick Bryant said that when you ‘excavate’ US history you realise that Trump isn’t an aberration, but the product of a strand that has been there from the start. Jon Sopel spoke of Trump’s brilliance at reading the mood of the country and appealing to its demons. (Obama appealed to its better angels.)

I learned just how entwined with the US Canada is – industrially, politically, culturally and militarily. The US defence plan in case of missile attack from over the Arctic is to knock any missiles out of the sky – above their obliging northern neighbour. Trump’s imposition of tariffs and rhetoric about a takeover creates for Canadians in general a visceral sense of having been punched in the face by a neighbour.

It got very gloomy, especially on the subject of allies’ failure to deal with Trump and Trumpism. But the session finished with a call from David Moscrop for a revitalisation of democracy with things that have been shown to work, of which the only one I noted down was citizen’s assemblies.

Oh, and then a little note, right at the end from either the Canadian or one of the Britishers, about how Australian electoral system has got so much right: compulsory voting, the independent electoral commission, and (to a burst of applause) the democracy sausage. Nick Bryant ended the panel by quoting David Malouf’s phrase, ‘citizenship lightly but seriously assumed’.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on the beautiful land of Gadigal of teh Eora Nation. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, a coiuple of kilometres down the hill. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Three, part 1

Posted on 28 May 2026 | Leave a comment

Saturday was my busiest day at the Festival. I had four sessions booked and then was given tickets to a fifth. There were three writer-in-conversation sessions and two panels about current politics. This post is about the former.

10 am Amitav Ghosh in Conversation

Amitov Ghosh was ‘in conversation’ with Michael Williams.

Michael Williams set up the conversation by suggesting that Amitav Ghosh had a kind of double vision: on the one hand he is a journalist with a PhD in social anthropology and a commitment to knowledge; on the other he writes fiction that involves ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. After Ghosh’s initial smiling response that writers are not normal people, the conversation expanded to take in elements of his biography, the genesis of his novels (including the brilliant Ibis trilogy, which wasn’t originally intended to be about the opium trade, but the facts got in the way of the other story), his love of travel, the absurdity of colonialist thinking, the British Empire as the world’s second narco state, the importance of Indigenous knowledge systems, and at last his most recent novel Ghost Eye.

I could have listened to him for hours. Here are some highlights:

  • A British reviewer of his first novel, The Circle of Reason (1988), commented that poor benighted third worlders could only write about politics, they had no inner life. Ghosh laughed and said, ‘Look at the United States now. They’re experiencing what we did then.’
  • Ronald Ross was a British doctor who was awarded the Nobel Proze in 1902 for discovering the malaria parasite. When Ghosh read his case notes, he found that all his major findings were in fact made by his Indian servants – who were given no credit.
  • He spoke about language in the Ibis trilogy. In colonial India, there were many Englishes. The multi-ethnic ship crews, the English colonisers who adopted Hindi words, etc. He said of those glorious passages where the language goes wild, that they don’t advance the story: Language is like white noise sometimes, its purpose is not to convey meaning but to establish the context in a kind of background hum. He referred us to Melville in Moby Dick for a similar use of language.
  • He mentioned his non-fiction book addressing climate change, The Great Derangement, which he wrote after the Ibis trilogy. I hadn’t heard of this book, and wonder of Ian MacEwan’s use of the phrase in his future-looking-back novel What We Can Know owes something to Ghosh.
  • In Western thought the world has come to be regarded as a machine whose function is to have goods extracted from it. We badly need to pay attention to First Nations / traditional ways of knowing, where teh world has not been desacralised. This is happening to some extent – he gave the example of the Wanganui River in Aotearoa/New Zealand being acknowledged as having legal personhood. But mining Indigenous cultures for their knowledge can be another form of extraction. The knowledge can’t really be separated from the stories by which it is communicated.
  • In the same reasonable tone, he told us that he doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but numerous studies in India and elsewhere have recorded phenomena which can only be explained by the existence of past lives: children suddenly recite long passages of classic books they can’t have read, etc.

I felt like we were in the presence of a great mind, who manages to communicate important, difficult ideas with an extraordinary lightness of touch and generosity of spirit, and also enjoys stirring the pot a bit.

We had a cup of tea with a friend, and a bite to eat, then off to Track 8, where train carriages were once built:

1.00: Melissa Lucashenko: A Writing Life

Winnie Dunn, author of Dirt Poor Islanders and an important part of the Western Sydney literary movement, was on stage with Melissa Lukashenko. As the session got under way, Melissa called out to people up the back to come and fill empty seats down the front – eventually people bowed to her benign authority and the front rows, perhaps reserved for celebrities who didn’t show, were filled.

The reason for the pairing of these two writers soon became apparent: Melissa lived for some time on Tonga, and Winnie is the first Tongan Australian writer to have a novel published. There was a relaxed vibe between the two of them: Winnie maybe not all that experienced at interviewing in front of a big, mainly white audience, and Melissa seeming competely comfortable in her own skin, right from that early moment when she beckoned us closer.

Melissa was there partly to promote her most recent publication, Not Quite White, a collection of essays, and she read beautifully from two of its essays. But the guts of the conversation was the story of her writing life.

Some highlights:

  • At a time of her life when she was newly divorced and living poor, she earned a living by driving an Uber and wrote her fifth novel, Mullumbimby, in her spare time. By the time it was published she was tossing up whether to go (back) to a life of crime [my brackets represent her smiling retraction of the word]. Then it won some significant awards and she was out of the poverty trap.
  • The story that’s allowed about Aboriginal people has shifted enormously in thirty years. When she wrote Too Much Lip, which also won substantial prizes, she feared that she would be attacked for its portrayal of family sexual violence, but she felt it had to be written – partly because of her activism with Sisters Inside. It turned out the attack didn’t come.
  • Asked how she found the voice for the main character in Too Much Lip, she said that character was written in anser to the question, ‘Who might I have become if I hadn’t gone to uni?’
  • Asked what she wanted from white readers, she said, ‘Stop the deficit narrative!’ (This was a nice echo of Amitav Ghosh’s mockery of the assumption of white superiority.)
  • On awards culture, she said that when her first novel, Steam Pigs, was short listed for a number of prizes, she had no idea what it meant. She kind of thought, ‘Oh well, you publish a novel, and then it gets listed for prizes.’ What mattered to her, then and now, is the response from readers, especially Aboriginal readers and family.
  • Advice to new writers: Have a second job!
  • When Winnie Dunn asked how she approached community responsibilities in her writing, she turned the question back on the questioner, ‘How do you do it?’ This came across as a real question, and Winnie Dunn took it that way and spoke eloquently of her own writing about and for the Tongan community. Melissa did say that when she writes she always has the voices of a couple of Elders in her head, especially one scathing old man. Sadly, she didn’t elaborate.

There were a couple more sessions, to be discussed in my next post, and then, after dark, with a ticket I had been given unexpectedly:

8.00: Maria Reva: Endling

Literary critic Beejay Silcox was on stage with Maria Reva, Ukrainian Canadian author of Endling, a book that I have read for the Book Club and enjoyed enormously. The book is about snails, the trade in brides in Ukraine, the Ukrainian war, and the impossibility of writing a novel about all that.

There were some nice moments of comedy. When Beejay spelled out her understanding of how metaphors worked in the novel. Maria said, ‘You should have written it!’ This became a running joke, I’m not sure at whose expense.

They discussed the process of writing the novel, which felt oddly like a synopsis of the novel itself, though its most splendid twists and turns were not revealed.

The novel started from an article about a scientist in Hawaii who had a project of saving snail species from extinction. And it also started out as a novel about ‘romance tours’ in Ukraine, where men from the USA come on tours wth the aim of finding a wife. Maria Reva found a way of combining these two themes and was feeling pleased with her plot-making abilities, as three of the young women from the romance tour kidnap a van-load of bachelors. Then Russia invaded Ukraine and she couldn’t see the point of the novel any more. She gave up on it and wrote the draft of something completely different – that went nowhere. Then came the moment of decision: ‘If the genre was imploding on me, I would take the reader down with me.’

She read a passage from the novel which, she said, was mostly verbatim from actual email correspondence, in which a journal editor wanted her to write what, in order to make the connection to the two other speakers today, I’ll call a ‘deficit model’ account of the Canadian Ukrainian community’s response to Russia’s invasion. It was funny when I read it a couple of weeks ago. It’s much funnier when you know it really happened! Maria Reva was clearly enjoying her revenge.

There was a lot more. I’ll mention just two things. One, the structure of the novel was inspired by the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. I knew it was familiar from somewhere! Two, the book started out being about women’s oppression in Ukraine, but once the war started, Maria Reva forgot about gender and the question became, ‘How do different minds cope with the cataclysm?’

My companion had read one book from Ukraine, ‘the one about tractors’. I had also read one, the one about bees. This was a whole other version of Ukraine and Ukrainians.

And so to bed.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day Two

Posted on 27 May 2026 | 6 comments

I just had two sessions at the festival on Friday. A third – S Shakthidharan’s session – was cancelled, so I was given a free evening as well as a long break in the middle of the day.

10 am: Big Histories

A historian, a novelist and a scholar walk onto a stage …

I’m a fan boy for Amitav Ghosh, whose Ibis trilogy (Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire) we’ve read at my Book Group (links are to my blog posts). I was swept away by Luke Kemp’s recent appearance on David Runciman’s Past Present Future podcast. Clare Wright’s democracy trilogy (The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, You Daughters of Freedom and Näku Dhäruk: The Bark Petitions) is a big deal. I felt like genuflecting when they took their seats.

Clare Wright set the ball rolling with some comments about history – how it needs to be endlessly discussed, debated and debunked. She said she intended to stay out of the way of the others because she knew they were keen to talk to each other. Happily, she didn’t fade into the background, but did an excellent job as facilitator.

Two books lay on the table for this session, each with a curse in the title, one looking at the broad sweep of history, the other beginning with a tiny, pretty much forgotten incident. Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse (2025) has a subtitle that announces its scope: The History and Future of Societal Collapse. The subtitle of Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021) does similar work: Parables for a Planet in Crisis.

Luke Kemp’s field of study is Existential Risk, which he explained is the risk of extreme societal collapse or even human extinction. Given the current state of the world, perhaps it will help, he said, to go back and study the way large societies have collapsed in the past. He names these large societies goliaths, and defends what might be seen as a gimmicky bit of language by saying that the usual word, civilisation, is misleading. The societies he discusses, ranging antiquity to the present, are not in fact civilised – they have all been brutal, increasingly unequal organisations built on the acquisition and defence of what he calls lootable resources. These are resources such as wheat or corn that can be seen, stored and stolen – as opposed to, say, yams, that grow underground, can’t be stored for long, and are not attractive to thieves. The goliaths are huge thieving organisations – civilisations as a title for them is pure propaganda. Like the biblical Goliath, they are huge and intimidating, they rule by violence and they are surprisingly fragile.

[Added later: I missed out one of Luke Kemp’s main points, possibly because once stated it’s obvious: before the coming of goliaths, humans lived in egalitarian communities. They weren’t without violence but it wasn’t organised warfare over territory or resources.]

Amitav Ghosh’s book is non-fiction. It tells the story of a massacre in 1621 on tiny Banda Island in what is now Indonesia. The island was the only place in the world where nutmeg grew. The islanders refused Dutch East India Company’s demand of exclusive access and, to cut a long story short, the Dutch murdered almost the entire population. Ghosh sees this ruthless act as part of the desacralising of nature, in which everything is seen in terms of potential profit. Barbados is now the world’s largest producer of nutmeg, he said, but no one there sings to the nutmeg trees as the Bandans once did, and the descendants of survivors still do.

There was a lot more. A brief discussion of what novels offer that histories can’t flew past before I cold take decent notes. Amitav Ghosh told stories of Dutch superstition in the 17th century as seen with amazement by the Bandans, whom they saw as benighted savages. The 17th century witch hunts in Europe were not, as we’ve been led to believe, driven by superstitious peasants, but were instigated by the elites as part of the project of destroying the sense of all things being connected and replacing it with the dominance of the profit motive. Not a lot of time was spent on contemporary USA, but when Luke Kemp listed the signs that a goliath was about to collapse, the relevance was shockingly clear.

There were so many ideas in this session I look forward to listening to it again when it comes out as part of the SWF podcast series.

Our next session brought a completely different kind of joy:

4 pm: Great Adaptations

Mick Herron, author of the Sloane House series of spy novels that have been made into the wonderful TV series, Slow Horses, says he writes novels without any idea of them becoming anything else. The adaptation was other people’s idea, and other people’s work.

Suzie Miller describes herself as a creature of the theatre. Her phenomenally successful play Prima Facie has been performed in many languages in many countries, and has been instrumental in having the law about rape changed in the UK. Partly because she had much more material than one actor could be expected to perform, she decided to adapt it to a film including the bits she’d had to ‘put in the garage’. She abandoned the film project and did a novel version. Then took up the film again, and it’s now in production.

Benjamin Law led them tactfully in an entertaining conversation that shed a lot of light on the differences among the forms: stage, TV, film and novel.

Playwrights are an interesting addition to television writing rooms, because they keep reaching for a sense of the whole form – which is what theatre demands. There was much talk about the excellent food and decor in writing rooms.

I think it was Suzie Miller who answered Benjamin’s question about the difference between the different forms: Theatre is basically an aural landscape, and as a writer you’re always dealing with other people’s input; cinema is primarily visual; novelists have space to develop their own vision.

Asked about ways they had been surprised in the adaptation process, Mick Herron said Gary Oldman is a lovely man. (In one of his books he described Lamb as looking like Timothy Spall gone to seed – people thought he might be disappointed to have Gary Oldman cast in the role, but it wasn’t so, he’d only mentioned Timothy Spall as shorthand descriptiion because he has no visual imagination.) Suzie Miller’s surprise has been to have people say to her about the novel, ‘That is my story.’

As a little side note, I was impressed about Benjamin Law’s facilitation. For example, someone told a story about egregious ignorance on the part of an unnamed senior writer in a TV room, a story that was remarkably similar to one I’d heard Benjamin tell in another context. An undisciplined person would have leapt into the conversation to tell that story, but he gave not a glimmer. He might looks like he’s on stage for a relaxed chat, but he’s very good at his job.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on beautiful, unceded Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day One, part 2

Posted on 26 May 2026 | Leave a comment

After a quick lunch at the pub a block away from the Carriageworks, we were back for three more sessions.

4 pm: Bringing the Past to Life

This was three novelists talking about historical fiction. Robbie Arnott (author of Limberlost and Dusk, links to my blog posts), Yann Martel (Life of Pi, which I read and loved long before blogging, and most recently Son of Nobody), and Tasma Walton (actor most notably in the Mystery Road television and film franchise, author of I am Nannertgarrook). They were wrangled by the incomparable Kate Evans.

Tasma Walton started from a family story, a great love story: one of her ancestors, an Aboriginal woman, met a white man and eloped with him to live on an idyllic island. She knew early on that something was not right about that version, and when she explored it she found the now familiar story of sealers raiding First Nations communities in what is now Victoria and kidnapping women to live a life of slavery. The book is part of the larger project of reclaiming language, and she told us that her training as an actor was important in creating these historical characters: she would give them a back story, imagine herself into the skin of the character, like an actor preparing for performance, then write.

Robbie Arnott was charming and funny. After saying, ‘I don’t like to be perceived,’ he cooperated and talked interestingly about himself and his books. No one had noticed, he said, that the sealers from Tasma’s book turn up in Dusk. ‘Oh, I noticed,’ Kate Evans said, ‘but we’ll get to that.’ Robbie said that Dusk had its origins in fishing trips with his father to the Tasmanian/lutruwita highlands. He was enchanted by that landscape and in particular by a moment when a herd of deer appeared out of the bush. He tries to capture the feel of that land in the book. Questioned about his invention of giant bones poking up out of the earth, he said they were his way of communicating how ancient the land felt. Jokingly (I think), he said that Dusk, the giant puma who gives the book its title, was inspired not by legends about big cats in the Australian bush but by cane toads – the prime example of disastrously introduced species.

Yann Martel really wanted to talk about his earlier book, Beatrice and Virgil, which is more accurately described as a historical fiction than Son of Nobody. But he did what Kate Evans asked of him and discussed the latter book – it’s a story of the Trojan War with footnotes. There’s a black line across the middle of each page – the Troy story unfolds above the line and the story of the footnote creator below it. Though he didn’t read the actual Iliad until he was an adult he was fascinated by the story as a child (Robbie Arnott interjected that he had read it as a child – ‘I didn’t have any friends.’) Because Troy is myth as much as history, he had freedom to invent, to jin the many authors these days who, for instance, retrieve the women’s stories. His Holocaust book features two taxidermied animals, a donkey and a monkey. He didn’t elaborate on how that relates to the history, beyond saying that it was his way of taking a fresh look at the familiar horrors.

There was an interesting discussion of violence. All three books include a lot of it. Tasma Walton said that every act of violence in her book comes from the colonial records, so it was difficult to write in the first person. Again her training as an actor came into play, especially the instruction, ‘Open your heart.’ Which is a good instruction for readers as well.

I came away from the session with Book Club possibilities in mind.

Two hours later, we came back for:

7 pm: Writing in the Age of Trump

This was a panel. Sisonke Msimang did a terrific job as host/facilitator. After introducing her three US writer guests – Tayari Jones, S.A. Cosby and Deborah Baker, all from the south of the USA – she said something like, ‘The title of the session means we have to talk about Donald Trump, but first tell us what your southern heritage means to you.’ And we didn’t get to Trump for at least 40 minutes.

S.A Cosby writes crime novels, but that was not what he was there for and I came away knowing very little about his books. He, like Tayari Jones (see previous blog post), writes against the assumption that the South is all about the oppression of Blacks. He and she spoke eloquently about Black culture, and Black community. She identified herself as a suburban Southerner.

Deborah Baker, the only non-Black person on stage, is the author of Charlottesville: An American Story, which gives the background of the ‘Unite the Right’ demonstration in 2017. She did a lovely job of explaining that there was debate in that city over three Confederate monuments – a lot of emotion, but generally attempts to hear each other – some African Americans, for instance, were in favour of keeping the memorials because without them important history is in danger of being forgotten. But white supremacists, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, decided to make it their issue, and things turned lethal.

In the lifetimes of the panellists – and none of them is as old as me – public schools in the south called the Civil War the ‘War of Northern Aggression’. It wasn’t about slavery but about state rights, they were told. I think it was Sean Cosby who said his response to that is, ‘States’ rights to do what?’

Some tidbits:

  • In 1956 Ezra Pound, incarcerated in a mental hospital in Washington DC because of his support for the Nazis, sent one of his disciples to start a race war in Charlottesville. History has echoes.
  • When Tayari Jones was at school, her parents wouldn’t give permission for her to ‘participate in white supremacist activities’ including an excursion to see the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain Park.
  • Sean Cosby’s face was mostly obscured by a baseball cap, which I think was to protect his eyes – because when he read to us, he seemed to have so much trouble making out the words that it was hard for us to follow the thread. But when at last the conversation turned to Donald Trump, he delivered a wonderful, passionately articulate rant that made one’s heart sing.

Again, with moments to spare, the Emerging Artist and I headed to our next sessions. She went to ‘Brave Conversations‘, which left her less than enthused, while I went to:

8 pm: Rhythm of Truth poetry gala

As the title suggests, this was a line-up of poets, the only poetry event I managed to attend in the whole festival. It was terrific.

Sara M. Saleh was in the chair. Sadly , she didn’t read any of her own poetry, though Maxine Beneba stepped into the breach and read one of Sara’s poems in her set. Riffing on the festival’s theme, ‘Show me the truth’, Sara said in her general introduction: ‘It’s a poet’s job to tell the truth, the kind that slips in before your mind catches up.’

Mariel Roberts Musa had two solo spots where she played the cello with electronic effects. They were intense and mesmerising intervals, but the poets were the main event (I’ve found links to some of the poems in case you want to chase them up):

  • Evelyn Araluen (I’ve blogged about Dropbear and The Rot) read three poems from The Rot, which she said were originally intended to be three parts of one long poem: ‘Sleep Act One’, ‘Sleep Act Two’ and ‘You’.
  • Michael Pedersen, among other things, Edinburgh’s Makar/Poet Laureate, stepped onto the stage with a stand-up’s flair and a thick Scottish accent, and performed ‘The cat prince‘ (featuring a weird little boy and a wonderful mother) and what he elsewhere calls a super-short friendship love poem, ‘Boys holding hands‘.
  • Nikita Gill, of Irish and Indian heritage, is apparently big on instagram. She read to us from a work in progress called ‘Men say things to me and then I have an existential crisis’. I especially loved the one where a man tells her to go back to the kitchen imagining it to be a confining space, but which she reimagines as the place where women connect and make things happen, including perhaps a revolution.
  • After reading a poem by Sara M. Saleh, Maxine Beneba Clarke read from her own book Beautiful Changeling. ‘I want to grow old’ speaks back eloquently to the idea that ageing is a bad thing, from the perspective of someone not yet 50. Good poem, I thought, but what do these whippersnappers know about growing old?
  • David Stavanger asked landlords in the audience to raise their hands and then sneered when no one did, ‘Landlords never raise their hands.’ His main theme seems to be mental illness. I liked ‘I’ve been thinking about your birth lately‘.
  • Omar Musa finished up the evening with a number of poems accompanied by ‘my beautiful wife’ Mariel Roberts Musa. He performed a version of ‘Queanbeyan‘. Then they totally destroyed the room with ‘The burning‘, which you can get some idea of from the video at the link: ‘you and me / we have become numb / numb even to burning’.

And that was the end of our first day.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026: My Day One, part 1

Posted on 25 May 2026 | 8 comments

The Sydney writers’ Festival is one of the highlights of my year. The venue, the Carriageworks, is a comfortable 40 minute walk from home. Though there are fewer free events than there used to be, the trade-off for the extra expense is the absence of huge queues with the prospect of a terrible seat, or no seat at all.

When I walked into Carriageworks early on Thursday afternoon I spotted volumes of Tony Abbott’s Australia: A History piled right next to Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline on the Gleebooks tables. I had arrived.

I got to my first session with minutes to spare, though because of problems with the sound system the session started late, so I had time to catch my breath.

1 pm: Holding Up the Mirror

This was a panel of three Jews reflecting on the current rise of anti-semitism in Australia, with Avril Alba, professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation at the University of Sydney, as a restrained, non-interventionist facilitator.

Lee Kofman, with flaming hair and a strong Russian/Ukrainian accent, appeared on this blog years ago for an essay about scars on women’s bodies (link here), which I mention only because she said that before Hamas’s 7 October massacre in Israel and the Israeli government’s horrific response, she wrote about personal things, including women’s issues and migrants’ concerns, but since then, and especially since the mass shooting at Bondi last December, she has been driven to write about Jewish issues.

Michael Visontay interviewed Ittay Flescher on a feed from Israel at last year’s festival (blog post here). This year he speaks for himself. He writes for the Jewish Independent – and says that the main effect that the Gaza genocide and Bondi murders have had on his writing is that he recognises more than ever the importance of being precise. In any conversation, with Jews and non-Jews alike, he feels the question before anyone says a word: where do you stand in relation to what’s happening in Palestine–Israel?

Jon Sopel, an English journalist, quoted Jonathan Miller’s quip that he wasn’t a Jew, but Jew-ish. (He mis-attributed the line to the very Jewish Woody Allen.) He was just finishing his book about returning to the UK after eight years in the USA when 7th October happened, and he realised he had to address anti-semitism and his own identity as a Jew.

The conversation ranged over a lot of hot-button topics. Is anti-Zionism antisemitic? Is the left’s wholehearted support of Palestinians tainted with antisemitism? Would people talk of a Blak person’s experience of ‘real or perceived racism’ as they talk of a Jew’s experience of ‘real or perceived antisemitism’? To what extent have concerns about anti-semitism led to a shutting down of free speech? What does it mean that in some places the extreme right have taken up anti-antisemitism?

All three panellists said they abhorred Netanyahu’s war on Gaza. None of them is actively religious. Antisemitism is viscerally important to all of them.

John Sopel, perhaps because he had more distance from recent horrific killings in Sydney, was able to offer a little historical perspective. He spoke of the way Sephardic Jews were mainly assimilated in Britain, and then in the early 20th century Ashkenazi Jews began to arrive, fleeing Russian pogroms. Institutions were established to help the newcomers assimilate. Lee said, correctly, that historically there hasn’t been safety in assimilation, but I would have loved someone to talk about the similar project of assimilation in Australia. (I believe, for instance that rabbis in the early 1900s wore Roman collars, so that Judaism presented itself as another denomination, rather than a whole other religion.) I guess that’s another subject.

My companion and I came away with a lot to talk about, but talking had to wait, because the session finished late and our next one was well under way when we shuffled as undisruptively as possible into our seats.

2 pm: Tayari Jones: Kin

Tayari Jones, African American novelist, was in conversation with Shankari Chandran. I haven’t read anything by either author, but I loved this conversation.

Tayari Jones’s most recent novel is Kin. Her previous one, An American Marriage (2018), was a critical and popular success, but then in May 2020 George Floyd was murdered and she found she couldn’t write. Until then she had thought writer’s block was an invented excuse for laziness, but faced with this harsh reminder of the depth of racism in her country she was overwhelmed with a sense of the futility of writing fiction. After a time, she realised that though a book could not put out a fire, ‘a book was what I had.’ At which Shankari Shadran exclaimed, ‘I think there are a lot of writers in this room who needed to hear that!’

It was an interesting conversation. Jones spoke of her childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, where the majority of the population is Black. She didn’t encounter white racism as a major thing when she was young: class was much more visible to her. There was a serial killer who preyed on children: in another part of the USA the press would have described his victims as Black children, but in Atlanta they were described as poor, or at least that’s how young Tayari saw it.

Among other things, Jones said that she was inspired by one of the slogans on the wall of her school – perhaps the Benjamin Elija Mays High School. The quote, roughly from Robert Browning’s poem ‘Andrea del Sarto’: ‘Your reach should exceed your grasp.’ This, she said, has stayed with her, reminding her not to settle into a rut. It occurs to me it’s a good thing for me to bear in mind as a reader as well, in two ways: first, not to shy away from difficult texts (see my future blog post on Jill Jones’s How to Emerge, with which I am currently struggling); and second, to appreciate when a piece of writing is ambitious in a good way even if it doesn’t quite pull it off.

I’m writing this when the festival is over. It’s interesting to note that both these sessions dealt with the way terrible events had a dramatic impact on a writer’s practice. This turned out to be a recurring topic. The festival’s motto, ‘Show me the truth,’ could easily have been swapped for, ‘What the heck just happened?’

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on unceded Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past and present, and welcome First Nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2026, Day one minus 10

Posted on 8 May 2026 | 3 comments

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is coming. On Wednesday evening this week I had a foretaste of its joys. Niall Williams chatted for an hour with Phillipa McGuinness at the State Library to a largely grey-haired audience. I was one of half a dozen men in the full auditorium.

Niall Williams was at the end of his Australian visit, having done what Seamus Heaney described as ‘standing on his hind legs’ in Hobart and Sorrento. But from where I was sitting I saw no sign of weariness or going through the motions.

His opening remark, ‘Everyone in Faha says hello,’ signalled that he expected the audience to have read at least one of his last three books, and the response indicated that he was right. (For readers who need help in understanding the enthusiasm, I refer you to my blog posts about History of the Rain, This Is Happiness and Time of the Child.

In just one hour the conversation covered a number of topics. Much was said about rain, religion and rural Ireland.

The Irish language, repressed by the occupying English for centuries, was forcibly revived with the establishment of the republic, and only now is having what feels like an organic revival. When Williams and his wife Christine moved to County Clare in 1984, they found that people there had unselfcosciously retained smatterings of Irish: he gave examples of a word meaning a fistful used in a recipe, and one meaning an armful used when asking someone to bring some peat from the yard.

Meditating on the phrase, ‘Once upon a time …’, he asked, ‘Why upon rather than, say, in or at?’ Story, he said with his hands as much as his words, lies on a plane above the real world. It doesn’t reproduce it, but refers to it. In writing about Faha, he doesn’t try to give an accurate picture of life in rural Ireland 80 years ago, but the story he tells rests upon his sense of what it was like.

When he first started writing about Faha – which by is based closely on the community he and Christine found in County Clare – he just didn’t want to stop. The book found its own way of coming to an end, so he went on to write another, and then another, and according to a bookmark given us at the end of the session, there’s another coming out in November, called O Now!

He read a couple of pages from Time of the Child. He chose the passage that ends with the doctor holding the little baby, and beginning to dance. There was magic in the way his body (and I suspect the bodies of half the audience) began ever so slightly to sway to the music of his sentences.

Phillipa McGuinness did a lovely job as interlocutor. Sadly there was no time for audience questions, so I didn’t get to ask how he would pronounce ‘Teige’ (see previous post for explanation). Even more sadly, the Emerging Artist and I had to leave before the end to perform out grand-duties. As we were leaving, Williams was paying tribute to his wife’s creativity in their garden and using gardening as an analogy for his own creative process.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. The State Library is on unceded Gadigal land and is built, as Phillipa McGuinness reminded us, from stone that was once sand walked on by the people who have lived here for tens of thousands of years. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

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2025 End of Year List 3: TV series

Posted on 4 Jan 2026 | 8 comments

The Emerging Artist and I watch far too much television. A lot of it is very good. To make a list of ‘best’ we had to struggle to extract specific shows from the blur. I’m not sure we agreed completely so here is my list compiled in consultation though not always complete agreement with the Emerging Artist. There are 23 titles in fairly shaky categories.

Reminiscence

Judge John Deed (G F Newman 2002–2007) was a new discovery for us which we loved mainly for Martin Shaw’s wonderful screen presence as a nonconformist judge. We binged on Northern Exposure (Joshua Brand and John Falsey 1990–1995), which held up surprisingly well. And our comfort binge was Rake, Season 1–5 (Peter Duncan, Richard Roxburgh and Charles Waterstreet 2010–2018), which probably couldn’t be made now but is fabulous.

Police

Soooo much crime. So many crime series are really about watching the face of the main detective as she (these days it’s very often a woman) does her detecting. From a huge field, we’ve selected these:

  • Blue Lights, season 3 (Declan Lawn & Adam Patterson) continues to follow the lives of a group of recruits to the Belfast Gardaí. Among other faces there’s that of Katherine Devlin
  • Dept. Q (from novels of Jusii Adler-Olsen 2025) transposes a Nordic crime series to Scotland. The face belongs to a bearded Matthew Goode.
  • Get Millie Black (Marlon James 2024), created by Jamaican novelist Marlon James, writes back to shows like Death in Paradise . The face is Tamara Lawrance’s.
  • Karen Pirie, series 1 & 2 (Emer Kenny 2022, 2025) is another Scottish procedural. The face is Lauren Lyle’s.
  • Trigger Point, Series 3 (Daniel Brierly 2025) is a bomb disposal unit in London, with Vicky McClure as the main face

Comedy

  • Nobody Wants This, season 2 (Erin Foster 2025), a romcom in which a Christian heritage woman and a rabbi negotiate their relationship.
  • The Studio (Seth Rogan 2025): inside Hollywood
  • Iris (Doria Tillier 2024): a comedy of manners featuring socially awkward truth-teller
  • The Rehearsal, season 1 & 2 (Nathan Fielder 2025): sometimes unsettling show about a man who helps people rehearse for stressful events in their lives
  • Étoile (Daniel Palladino & Amy Sherman-Palladino 2025): French and a New York ballet companies swap key talents
  • The Change, season 2 (Bridget Christie 2025): A post-menopausal woman sets out on a journey of self discovery in the English woods where she gets entangled with a deeply weird community

Drama

  • The Diplomat, season 3 (Debora Cahn 2025): what looks increasingly like fantasy in the age of Trump, a woman with bad hair (Keri Russell) is a brilliant diplomat
  • The Shift / Dag & Nat, Season 2 (Lone Scherfig 2024): a Danish obstetrics unit under pressure day and night
  • Sherwood, season 2 (James Graham 2024): a community where the wounds from the miners’ strike under Thatcher still sting
  • The Hack (Jack Thorne 2025): David Tennant with bad hair as an investigative journalist versus the Murdoch empire
  • Paradise (Dan Fogelman 2025): this starts out as a murder mystery and develops into a dystopian fantasy
  • Down Cemetery Road (Morwenna Banks 2025): Emma Thompson, also with bad hair!

Documentary series

We didn’t watch many documentary series this year, but the five-episode Mr. Scorsese, directed by Rebecca Miller was excellent. Lots of clips and wonderful interviews with family, friends, actors and other directors.

My nominations for Year’s Best

  • Adolescence (Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham 2025). Brilliant brilliant brilliant!
  • Slow Horses Season 5 (Will Smith and others, from books by Mick Herron 2025): Five seasons in, this is still funny and gripping and leaves me wanting more. You come away thinking you could smell Gary Oldman.

Thank you for reading this far. Please add your own favourites in the comments.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day four, part two

Posted on 5 Jun 2025 | 2 comments

The young woman who was my neighbour at the launch of Ritual was just at the festival for the one day. She said she planned to go to ‘all the Palestinian sessions’. My next two sessions would have been on her radar.

1 pm: Peter Beinart: Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza

Peter Beinart is a New York journalist, commentator, substacker, and professor of journalism and political science.  He was in conversation with ABC journalist Debbie Whitmont.

He began by saying that he hoped there would be people in the packed room who disagreed with him. If there were any such, he made no attempt to placate them, but left us in no doubt about his views. He spoke fast (and at times furious), so please don’t take this as a summary of his whole presentation, but here are some things I jotted down.

The Jewish community in the USA and elsewhere is painfully divided over current events in Israel-Palestine. He begins his book Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza with a letter to a former friend: speaking from a position of love and Jewish solidarity, he says that something has gone horribly wrong, that the current action of Israel is a profound desecration, the greatest spiritual crisis of Judaism since the Holocaust.

There has been a great sustaining story for Jews. They are the world’s perpetual victims. In line with that narrative, Hamas’s horrific attacks on 7 October 2023 are seen in the context of the Holocaust and, before that, the centuries of pogroms and persecution. But placing the attacks in that narrative is to dehumanise Palestinians. To understand 7 October we need to look to different analogies – the example he gave was of a group of Native Americans who broke out of virtual imprisonment to perform a horrific massacre. In the case of 7 October, the Israeli Jews weren’t a marginalised group – it was horrible that they were killed but they were members of the oppressing group.

The narrative behind the creation of Israel is that Jews need a safe place. But supremacy does not make you safe. In South Africa it was widely believed that the relinquishment of white supremacy and Apartheid would lead to a bloodbath because whites would no longer be protected from the armed resistance. It didn’t happen(whatever the current president of the USA might say). Similar fears in Northern Ireland proved to be illusory. When structures of supremacy were taken down, the violence pretty much ended.

Yet the fear persists. Jewish Israelis fear to visit Gaza or the West Bank – while going to hospitals where there are many Palestinians among the doctors and nurses. Rather than argue, one needs to ask, ‘What are the experiences that led you to that belief?’

The answer is partly that the Holocaust is not ancient history. There are still fewer Jews in the world than there were in 1939. He is not suggesting that we should forget the past, but it matter what stories we tell. In his early 30s he went (as a journalist, I think) to spend time with Palestinians on the West Bank. Nothing in his life had prepared him for the brutality and terror he witnessed there. He realised then that the story of the persecution of the Jews was not the only story, and not the main one to tell in Israel-Palestine.

Among some circles there is a new definition of what it means to be a Jew. To be a real Jew, you must unconditionally support Israel. This, he says as an observant Jew, is a form of idolatry – the worship of something human-made. States are meant to support their citizens. Under this new definition, the state of Israel is to be worshipped: it’s not a relationship of support but of adoration. Likewise there’s a new definition of antisemitism that includes anti-Zionism: this would mean that any support of Palestinians is antisemitic. Again he quoted Edward Said, ‘Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate.’ This would make that denial absolute.

In fact, Jews are disproportionately represented in pro-Palestinian activities in the USA. These are not ‘self-hating’ Jews, but Jews acting in keeping with longstanding cultural values.

The last sentence of my notes: ‘Jews need to be liberated from supremacy.’

4.30: Plestia Alaqad: The Eyes of Gaza

Plestia Alaqad is a young Palestinian woman who has defied the lack of permission named by Edward Said. On 6 October 2023, a recent graduate, her application for a job with a news outlet in Gaza was rejected: local journalists weren’t needed. On 9 October, after the Hamas attack on Israel and the beginning of Israel’s response, she received a call saying things had changed. So she began an astonishing period of reporting. (At least, this is what I gathered from this conversation; the Wikipedia page tells a slightly different story.) For six weeks, she published first-person eye-witness accounts as Israel’s attacks on Gaza became more intense. She also published her diary on Instagram, giving millions of followers what Wikipedia calls ‘an unfiltered glimpse into the harrowing realities of life under siege’. And she wrote poetry. Her book, Eyes of Gaza, is a memoir built from her Instagram diaries.

At the beginning of the session, Sarah Saleh stepped onto the stage and sat beneath the huge screen to tell us who Plestia Alaqad was. Being completely ignorant, I assumed Plestia Alaqad was about to be beamed in from the Middle East, like Ittay Flescher and Raja Shehadeh. In fact, she is currently living in Australia, having left Gaza in November 2023 in fear for her family’s safety. Sara was alone on the stage so her guest could make an entrance: our applause was accepted, not by a stereotypically dour, hijab-wearing Palestinian refugee, but by a glamorous, vivacious, long-haired young woman.

The entrance wasn’t just a nice piece of theatre. Like Flescher and Shehadeh, she sees her work as being in large part to counter the dehumanisation of Palestinians – and she made us see her as human. This is why she writes about shopping as well as the outright horrors. ‘People don’t expect to see me shopping. They want to donate clothes to me.’

‘I knew how to be a journalist,’ she said, ‘but not how to be a journalist in the middle of a genocide.’

‘You have to deal with the genocide,’ she said, ‘and then you have to deal with the media’s treatment of it.’ Once she had come to public notice, mainstream journalist wanted to hear from her. She told us of one interview, with an Israeli news outlet I thnk, where the interviewer kept asking her leading questions, wanting her to say something like, ‘Kill all Jews.’ But this is not her position, and she referred constantly to the perpetrators of atrocities specifically as the IDF, not even ‘the Israelis’ in general. The interview was not published.

Children in Gaza grow up afraid of the sky.

About her book, she said, ‘I want people of the future to not believe that this book is non-fiction.’

5.30: Anna Funder, Closing Address: Bears Out There (click for podcast)

It was a hard transition from Plestia Alaqad to the formalities of the festival’s closing address. The CEO Brooke Webb (wearing a Protect the Dolls t-shirt), Artistic Director Ann Mossop and the NSW Minister for the Arts John Graham each spoke in justifiably self-congratulatory mode. What remains tantalisingly in my memory from all three speeches is an unexplained image of Jeanette Winterson being pursued by three stage managers. Apparently it was funny and made sense, but I guess you had to be there.

Anna Funder’s speech was terrific. The bears of its title came from an incident in her childhood. At a campsite in a Claifornian redwood forest, she needed to go to the toilet. Her mother, who was breastfeeding little Anna’s baby sister, told her to go to the toilet block by herself. When she came back and said she couldn’t go alone because, ‘There’s a bear down there,’ her mother, like the mother in Margaret Mahy’s classic children’s book, A Lion in the Meadow (it’s me, not Anna Funder, making that comparison), told her to stop making things up. The third time little Anna came back she was accompanied by a burly man who wanted to know who kept sending this small child to the toilet block when there was a bear there.

She went on to offer a range of perspectives on that story. Her mother told it often as a humorous story against herself as a neglectful mother. It could be read as showing the importance of the kindness of strangers. And so on.

I’m writing this at least ten days after the event, from very scanty and mostly unreadable notes, but where the story landed in the end was to make an analogy with the work of a writer, to go to places where there are bears – in Anna Funder’s case, the world of secret police, patriarchy, and like that. In these days, with the advent of AI under a global surveillance oligarchy, we need to recognise the importance of human beings writing and reading, daring to go where the robots cannot.

For the podcast of this address, clink on the title above. [Added later: An edited version was published in the July 2025 issue of the Monthly.]

And that’s it for another year, bar the events scheduled outside the week in May and of course the podcast series (I’ll add links to them as they appear). The Festival had an official blogger, Dylin Hardcastle. You can read his blogs at this link.

The small fraction of the Festival that I saw was terrific. At least four people, from different perspectives, spoke of the importance of countering the dehumanisation of Palestinians. There were lots of Readers against Genocide t-shirts, but any fears that there would be displays of antisemitism proved to be unfounded. There were wonderful poetry events – curated as part of the First Nations program, featuring a spectacular international guest, launching a landmark anthology of Muslim poets. I missed the intimate poetry sessions that were a feature of the Festival when it was held at the Walsh Bay wharves. Maybe next year we could have Pádraig Ó Tuama, or Judith Beveridge, or Eileen Chong, or a swag of poets from Flying Islands, Australian Poetry, or Red Room.

I gained new insights into books I’d read, and was tantalised about books I hadn’t. I’ve come away with a swag from Gleebooks, and have added to my already vast To Be Read shelf. I’ve already read a book by Raja Shehadeh from the Newtown library and am part way through a book by Emily Maguire.

Normal blogging will resume shortly.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on Gadigal land. I have written this post on Gadigal and Wangal land, where the days are growing shorter and colder beneath, at this moment, a cloudless sky. I acknowledge Elders past, present and emerging and warmly welcome any First nations readers of this blog.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2025: My day four, part one

Posted on 2 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

The final day of the festival dawned clear and not too cold. We had another early start, not for fun and games this time, but for a line-up of three journalists and an academic to ruminate about Trump 2.0.

10 am: Trumpocalypse Now (Link is to the podcast)

Barrie Cassidy makes hosting a panel discussion look like the easiest thing in the world. This conversation just flowed. The formidably well informed and articulate panellists were Peter Beinart (of whom more later), Nick Bryant (author of When America Stopped Being Great and The Forever War), and Emma Shortis (Director of the Australia Institute’s International & Security Affairs Program). Mostly they were in furious agreement about the meaning of Trump’s re-election..

Peter Beinart kicked things off by saying that the USA has been a multiracial democracy only since 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed – forms of racial and gender supremacy are much more deeply rooted than democracy. Nick Bryant agreed with this in the manner of someone whose thunder had been stolen. Emma Shortis chimed in the we have to shelve our assumptions of normal order. And we were off.

I can’t tell you who said what, but what follows are some of the main points that made it into my scribbled notes (and that I can decipher).

If Trump had been in Europe he would have led a minor party. But the USA has only two parties, and there is a culture of extreme partisanship. The Republican Party’s elite had been delegitimised in the eyes of the Republican base, among other things because of its engagement in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Trump rode in on that wave of distrust – it wasn’t a hostile takeover.

They discussed the tariffs, the need for a co-ordinated response to Trump by the USA’s allies (not going to happen), and what Albanese should do (get out of AUKUS – not going to happen), and more. ‘We’re ripe,’ Peter Beinart said, ‘for a massive insurgency in the Democratic Party.’ It could happen.

Barrie Cassidy asked why Gaza didn’t become a campaign issue. I thought for a minute he was referring to the Australian election, but he meant in the USA. The answers were interesting. Again, I’m not sure who said what.

To get power in the Democrats you have to build a career on ultra-caution about the Middle East. Biden won against Trump in 2016 because he presented himself as the loving grandfather who cared about people’s suffering. But when he refused to extend that love to babies in Gaza he lost a lot of support. He didn’t listen to that response, and nor did Kamala Harris. When, more recently, Trump used accusations of antisemitism as justification for his attacks on free speech, the Democrats had already ceded that ground by their support of a conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. To be against Israeli actions in Palestine (in both Gaza and the West Bank) is not to be antisemitic. Some Jewish students may feel uncomfortable but that is fundamentally different from being unsafe. In fact, the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus and elsewhere in the USA are full of Jewish students. Peter Beinart quoted Edward Said: Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate.

Which provides a segue to my next session, an hour later.

12 noon: Ritual (Link to podcast be added if/ when it is available.)

Ritual is the first anthology of poems by Muslim-Australian writers. This was its launch

The session started with dramatic solemnity. Three women walked quietly to their chairs and somehow we knew not to applaud. A prayer was read in Arabic, Country was acknowledged, the suffering of Palestinians named. You could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

The session alternated between readings by poets included in the anthology and conversations between Winnie Dunn, general manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, as facilitator, and the two editors of the anthology – Sara M. Saleh (performance poet, and educator and human rights lawyer of Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese heritage) and Zainab Syed (Pakistani Australian with a scary range of skills and accomplishments to her name).

The book was conceived as a celebration of the diversity of Muslim Australians. The editors didn’t just put out a call for submissions and then choose from what came in the mail. They organised a retreat, and followed it up with community building events – a Muslim First Nations woman, Eugenia Flynn, had input, and a Muslim poet from the USA provided mentorship. But part way through the project, the Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing genocide in Gaza changed the literary landscape. Poetry became a refuge.

At the start of the session, Sarah Saleh told us that heartbreaking and enraging events in Gaza were threatening to steal the joy of the occasion from her. Zainab Syed was in Pakistan when the conflict over Kashmir erupted. They were both resolved not to give in to the dark. Zainab reminded us that the great poet Rumi wrote in a time of great horrors, and from one perspective his poetry is a protest against erasure. ‘As ritual, as prayer, as inheritance, poetry can be a sovereign record of our whole selves.’

The poems that were read, like the poets who read them, were marvellously diverse. I was too engrossed to take notes. It’s an anthology worth buying.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival took place on Gadigal land. I have written this post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging.

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