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.
Me fail? I fly! 