Tag Archives: Sydney Writers’ Festival

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

Posted on 29 May 2025 | 1 comment

My Saturday morning was topped off with a session at noon, then one in the late afternoon.

12 pm: The Wood and the Trees (I’ll add a link to the podcast when/if it is released.)

This was a chat among three non-fiction writers who are passionate about the environment, and especially trees: Sophie Cunningham (This Devastating Fever, City of Trees), Inga Simpson (Where the Trees Were and Understory) and Ashley Hay (Gum). Aashley Hay was there as facilitator and said very little about her own work, though Inga Simpson at one stage acnowledged her as an important influence on her own writing.

The conversation ranged widely over the science and poetry of trees, trees as intimate companions and as culturally significant beings, trees under threat from climate change and capitalist rapacity. Forest bathing was mentioned, but not explained.

Ashley Hay kicked the session off by asking each of the others for her first memory of trees. Their answers were terrific, but I confess that the main effect of the question was to send me ricocheting off to memories of my own: there are at least a dozen individual trees that were important to me as a child, ranging from the solitary pawpaw tree that grew right next to our verandah to the guava tree in the far cow paddock that I felt was my own personal discovery. I did pay attention to what the writers were saying, but what I took from the session was this powerful blast of nostalgia.

There is currently a hunger for information and thinking about trees, we were told, and for trees themselves, perhaps because the climate crisis is threatening them. A list of recent books emerged. I guess I share that hunger as I’ve read at least some of the books. Honourable mention went to Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (link to my blog post), Suzanne Zimard’s Finding the Mother Tree (on my TBR shelf), and Richard Powers’ The Overstory (my blog post again). And there’s Sophie Cunningham’s instagram account Sophie’s Tree of the Day, which I would definitely be following if I used Instagram. And the same goes for US poet Ada Limón’s ‘You Are Here‘ project.

The Nutmeg’s Curse by the superb writer Amitav Ghosh was quoted. Leonard Woolf was a tree enthusiast, and one of Virginia’s last diary entries was about his trees. We were told about the miraculous survivor trees of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The session ended with someone – I think it was Ashley Hay – reading us the Adrienne Rich poem ‘What Kind of Times are These?’ You can read the whole poem at this link. Here’s the last stanza, rich with implication about why this was an important session to have at a writers’ festival in 2025:

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

I was reluctant to go out again after a couple of hours in the comfort of home. But duty called, and I dragged myself up the hill to attend possibly the only solo poetry reading of the festival, the only African heritage person to top a bill. It turned out to be THE BEST EVENT OF THE FESTIVAL:

4.30 pm Lemn Sissay: Let the Light Pour In

After a disembodied voice acknowledged that we were on Gadigal land, Lemn Sissay burst onto the stage in a mustard yellow suit to a huge burst of applause – evidently the room was filled with fans, some of whom may have attended workshops he had led earlier. He made a physically huge show of lapping up the applause, and his energy didn’t sag for the whole hour.

What to say about what followed? He began with a comment that any event is open to a number of interpretations – and told us of a moment when another festival guest had assumed he was a taxi driver. Now you might take some meaning out of that, he said (Sissay is Black), but maybe he was just waiting for a taxi. Then, moving on, having raised and disowned the racism interpretation, he muttered cheerfully, ‘I hate him anyway.’

The first poem he performed is a long narrative, ‘Mourning Breaks’, which was accompanied by projections of dramatic stylised drawings. Disarmingly, he stopped after a couple of stanzas – ‘I’m not happy with doing it like that’ – and started over. It’s a gruelling poem in which a man hangs from a branch on the face of a cliff, refusing to let go. Sissay has uploaded a performance, without the images, at this link – if you watch it, stay to the end because it’s got a killer last line.

As we were recovering, he did some fabulous comedy about poetry readings: If you came here with a friend, and were thinking, ‘How much more of this do I have to sit through?’, if you were thinking, ‘I know a bit about poetry readings, and he should have started with something light to warm us up,’ if you came with a friend and were thinking, ‘This relationship is doomed,’ …. all I can say is, ‘I’m sorry.’

The rest of the session focused on his most recent book, Let the Light Pour In (Canongate Books 2023). He has written about trauma, he told us, including a play adaptation of Benjamin Zephaniah’s novel Refugee Boy, and work about his own difficult childhood growing up in care. But this is not a book about trauma. For 13 years, he wrote a poem every morning – they had to have four lines, and the second and fourth had to rhyme. Many of them were crap. This book contains the best of them, and he read us some wonderful ones, interspersed with chat that was a brilliant illustration of the line from Terry Pratchett quoted in an earlier session: ‘The opposite of funny isn’t serious, the opposite of funny is not-funny.’ Lemn Sissay was very funny, and also very serious.

He showed us a photo of one of his short poems taking up the whole of a man’s arm. He showed us the website of a marriage celebrant who featured one of his poems (‘Invisible kisses’, a kind of response to Kipling’s ‘If’). He asked if anyone in the audience had used that poem at their wedding. One person had. He then said he was suing all those people. (In response to a question at the end of the reading, he reassured us that of course he wasn’t suing anyone, and spoke interestingly about the way the internet and AI are changing the nature of copyright and intellectual property.)

Some poems he tossed off. Some, especially one that went right over our heads, he carefully explained (it was a joke poem that hinged on spelling of ‘yacht’). Some he lingered over, performed a number of times to allow them to settle in. One of those, he said, he wrote for young mothers who gave their babies up for adoption (not, he said, ‘abandoned’ but heroically gave the babies a chance of a better life):

Remember you were loved 
I felt your spirit grow 
I held on for the love of you 
And then for love let go

Then, he told us, a friend of his asked him to read this poem at her wife’s funeral – the poem took on a whole other meaning, still profoundly moving. ‘All poetry,’ he said more than once, ‘is an emotional witness statement.’ He also said, ‘There is no one way to do a poetry reading.’ He could have added, ‘There’s no one way to be a survivor of care, a University Chancellor, a literary prize judge, an OBE.’

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging. It’s still raining.

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Sydney Writers’ Festival 2024: My day three, part one

Posted on 28 May 2025 | 4 comments

Saturday 24 May, the weather relented a little. The Emerging Artist and I usually do the Sydney Morning Herald quiz in bed in the morning. Today we went to Carriageworks to do it as a communal affair.

10 am: The Good Weekend quiz

Quizmaster Brian Yatman was interviewed by Benjamin Law about how he goes about creating a quiz. The only tidbit I remember is that any question involving Dolly Parton comes from Yatman’s wife. Then we got down to it, a special literary quiz written especially for this audience, with prizes.

The EA and I resisted instructions to form a team with up to three others, and scored 18 out of 25, a decent score. But the two top scoring teams were at 23 or so – we left during the tie-breaker because we didn’t want to add to a ragged start of our next session. If it had been a more intimate affair I might have queried our score. In response to a question about what four books had in common – the only one I remember is Jane Austen’s Persuasion – we said that each of them was the last one written by its author. The ‘correct’ answer was that they were all published posthumously. The EA insists that our answer was also correct, and I’d be prepared to argue that case. So maybe we scored 19.

But without pause to draw breath:

11 am: Yael van der Wouden: The Safekeep

This is another book I’ve read and blogged about (link here). Yael van der Wouden was in conversation with Claire Nichols, presenter of The Book Show on the ABC.

The first thing I have to report is that, if Claire Nichols is to be relied on, the pronunciation of the author’s family name is very close to Fun de Vow-dun. The second thing is that van der Wouden is as much a debut novelist as last night’s panellists. She’s experiencing the first of everything: she’s never been this far from home, she doesn’t know anyone here, she hasn’t talked about herself to rooms full of people before. She’s relieved that she didn’t win the Booker because that would have meant far too much time away from her loved ones.

Apart from that the conversation, or at least my scribbled notes from it, covered four main topics.

First, language. It’s an obvious subject to raise in relation to a book written in English by a Dutch writer. It turns out that English is van der Wouden’s first language. Her mother spoke Hebrew, her father spoke Dutch, and they used English to communicate with each other. She was born in Israel and moved to the Netherlands when she was ten years old. As a result she is ‘proficient in a chaos of three languages’. English is for writing, Dutch is for doing tax returns, etc.

Second, the narrative about World War Two in the Netherlands. In the mainstream version, the Resistance looms large. Only resistance fighters were celebrated on Remembrance Day – it wasn’t until the 1960s that Jews, Roma and other groups were included. The narrative has been changing thanks to the work of many scholars. It’s now generally recognised that the resistance to the Nazis wasn’t as significant as in, say, France, and that seventy-five percent of the Netherlands’ Jews were ‘despatched’, very few returned after the war, and of those many didn’t stay. The novel sits squarely among attempts to retrieve the real story.

Third, sex. In my blog post about the book, I said, ‘At times I felt like averting my eyes, as if I was intruding on intensely intimate moments.’ van der Wouden would have been pleased to read that, as she said that in writing the now famous sex scenes, mainly in Chapter 10, she wanted to make the reader aware that they were a voyeur. When Claire Nichols asked how she did that, she said some interesting things. First, erotic writing only works as a continuation of what has gone before it: in this case the long build up of repressed desire in her main character, Isabelle, at first experienced by her as disgust. The emotional content matters. In writing the sex scenes, she swings between the haptic (things to do with touch), something more abstract, something emotional, then back to the haptic.

Asked about the difference between good and bad sex scenes, she said it’s all about intention. Putting on her hat as creative writing lecturer, she told us that unless the aim is to be funny, the writer needs to commit fully, not lean into comedy or grossness. Surprisingly, she went on to say that it doesn’t work to borrow from your own sexual experience. I think her point was that if you do that you skip the work that needs to happen to take the reader with you. As I don’t have any immediate plans to write erotic scenes, I may not have paid close enough attention to these instructions.

The conversation ended with some reflections about being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, incuding a lovely anecdote about meeting one of her literary heroes at the Booker ceremony and not recognising her. The conversation went like this: ‘Good luck.’ ‘Thank you.’ ‘I’m Sarah.’ ‘Nice to meet you.’ ‘Waters.’ Yael cries.

I went to two more sessions on Saturday. I’ll write about them in my next post.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, 45 minutes walk away, where the memory of ancient wetlands is currently very strong and the dark is coming earlier every night. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

Posted on 27 May 2025 | 3 comments

By the end of the festival I was suffering from information overload. I plan to blog about every session, but it may take a little longer than I’d like. I’m writing this on Tuesday – about last Friday.

2 pm: Alan Hollinghurst: Our Evenings

Hollinghurst appeared on stage, the very picture of an urbane British novelist, in discussion with British journalist Georgina Godwin. (Georgina’s brother Peter is also a guest at the Festival – I didn’t book for any of his sessions but was enthralled by his conversation with Sarah Kanowski on ABC Radio, which – serendipitously – I listened to while walking home from the festival.)

The conversation focused on Hollinghurst’s novel Our Evenings, which I’ve read and blogged about (at this link). The conversation flowed and Hollinghurst had a lot of interesting things to say. I’ll just mention a couple of them.

GG’s opening question was about first-person narration. After talking about its advantages and limitations as he had found them in his first novels, Hollinghurst said that though he will never write a memoir, he realised that he wanted this book to read like one. He won’t write an actual memoir because he doesn’t really know who he is – and when the audience laughed at that he thanked us for our kindness but said it was true. (I just reread my blog post about Our Evenings and see that our book group felt that one of the main things about its protagonist David Win is that he doesn’t really know who he is. It looks as if we were onto something.)

Hollinghurst wanted a character who was like him but with at least one undisguisable difference. His main character / narrator, David Win, is mixed race Burmese and British. Hollinghurst wouldn’t have dreamt of giving David, say, Caribbean parents, which would have entailed a massive feat of the imagination. As it is, David (or Dave, as I’m pretty sure Hollinghurst called him throughout the conversation) never knew his Burmese father – he is brought up in a completely white environment with just mementoes – a photograph, some items of clothing. He never visits Burma/Myanmar, and knows no more about it than a white English novelist who does some online research. But the difference is real, and perhaps just as much as class and sexuality it’s a driver of the plot.

The other thing I want to mention came up in response to a question. There were no questions from the floor, but Georgina Godwin harvested them from an online platform. Someone asked what it was like to have progressed from being a queer novelist to being a British novelist. Hollinghurst said that probably happened with the Booker Prize for The Line of Beauty. It’s not that he stopped writing on queer themes – there’s plenty of same-sex desire and deed in Our Evenings – but he never wanted to write for a niche audience. He wanted to be part of the general conversation. This interested my partly because of how it chimed with what First Nations poet Jazz Money had said in an earlier session: that as an Indigenous queer woman it was only after her first book was well received that she realised she had the gift of responsibility – in effect, the responsibility to be part of a general conversation.

Oh, he read to us, and it was great to be reminded of how beautifully he puts words and sentences together.

7 pm: Raja Shehadeh: Chronicling Palestine

While we were waiting for this session to begin, with Australian Abbas El-Zein (whose Leave to Remain I blogged about a while back, at this link) sat in darkness on the stage. Curious about the two athletic looking young men sitting next to me, I asked what had attracted them to the session. ‘That’s our dad up there,’ one of them said. ‘And we love Raja Shehadeh,’ the other added, and recommended especially his book, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.

Then the giant screen came alive and Raja Shehadeh was beamed in from his home in Ramallah in the West Bank. He is a lawyer and the founder of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq. He’s also a prolific writer. In this conversation, Abbas el-Zein asked him about three recent books:

  • We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (2023). After his lawyer activist father was murdered, his mother wanted him to deal with the boxes of papers he left behind; when he eventually looked in the boxes he learned a lot. He said, ‘I did what I never did in his lifetime. I came to terms with his suffering.’
  • What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (2024) This began as a lecture on the Naqba delivered in Japan
  • Forgotten: Searching for Palestine’s Hidden Places and Lost Memorials, due for publication later this year, written with his wife Penny Johnson. Its seed was when they came across a plaque in the west Bank commemorating the death of a group of Egyptian soldiers in the 1967 war. Who knew Egyptian soldiers had been there? he wondered. What other forgotten pieces of the Israel-Palestine story were told in such neglected monuments?

His writing, he said, has been an effort to show what really happened in the past as opposed to the romantic versions accepted by younger generations. Yet, as the settlements are eating up land on the West Bank, there is urgency in the present that he also must address.

The central question in his work is, How can these two nations live together after this? What he means by ‘this’ has grown ever more momentous. But there is no other way. What is happening now is destroying the state of Israel just as surely as it is destroying the lives of so many Palestinians in Gaza.

As at many moments during this Festival, I thought about Kathy Shand , who retired as Chairman of the Festival board just before this year’s program was announced, probably because of concerns over the way Israel-Palestine issues were being platformed. If she got to hear this session, she might have regretted her departure.

8 pm: Big Beginnings (I’ll add a link to the podcast if/when it is released.)

This was a fun session. A dour irishman, an urbane mixed-race Englishwoman and a flamboyant Melbourne man who lives in Athens, each dealing with and perhaps reeling a little from the success of a first novel.

Madeleine Gray (whose own first novel, Green Dot, made a splash last year) chaired the panel with cheerful authority, leading them down a clear path of well-constructed questions: What were the circumstances in which you wrote the novel? What was your path to publication? Where did the idea start? What role does humour play? Who were your big influences, including those you only realised after the book was finished? What’s your research process? What’s the weirdest thing that’s happened since publication?

We learned:

Dominic Amerena (I Want Everything) was earning money while he wrote the book by doing medical trials – the book is partly a revenge for those precarious times. It was a struggle to write but once he submitted it, it was a dream run. The book is an inside-publishing mystery-scandal, and began with Dominic being fascinated by the number of Australian literary hoaxes – he rattled off a list of five from Ern Malley to The Hand that Signed the Paper. What is so Australian about them, he wondered. The Whitlam era features in the novel, and in his research he discovered stories about ‘men’s rights terrorism’ of the time – which he found a way of squeezing in.

Kaliane Bradley (The Ministry of Time) had lost a job in publishing because of Covid and though she got a new one she was working from home, knew no one in the new office and felt very precarious. She submitted the manuscript under a pseudonym because she is known by agents and editors. Once it was accepted, she had to do six rewrites over a year. The seed of the book was a photograph of ‘a sexy dead guy’ – a member of a lost polar expedition of 1845. She wanted to bring him back to life, to amuse herself and her friends. In the rewrites she had to think about literary genre tropes – elements of romcom, sci-fi, spy thriller. The word mash-up came to mind. She won me when she proclaimed her love of Terry Pratchett, and quoted him: ‘The opposite of funny isn’t serious. The opposite of funny is … not funny.’

Ferdia Lennon’s (Glorious Exploits) was teaching at a university near Disneyland in London when Covid gave him time to write the book. He’d long been obsessed with Ancient Greece, and had read a line in an ancient historian saying that Athenian prisoners-of-war kept in appalling conditions in Syracuse would be given extra food if they could produce a quote from Euripides. (I’ve just read the novel, and can tell you that’s pretty much how it starts.) In his research, he tried to suss out what it would have felt like to be there: he visited the quarries where prisoners were held.

We were well entertained for an hour.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land, 45 minutes walk away, where the memory of ancient wetlands is currently very strong and the dark is coming earlier every night. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

Posted on 24 May 2025 | Leave a comment

Friday, and there’s a pile of umbrellas just inside the main entry to the Carriageworks.

23 May, 11 am: Songstress Poetica (Link to be added when/if podcast is released)

This was a charming hour with four First Nations women from this continent and a distinguished Emirati poet and scholar. It was in part a master class in relationality as the Indigenous women found many points of warm connection – shared Irish heritage, similar experience with singing, sharing of language, appreciation of each other’s work.

In the chair was Dr Alethea Beetson, a Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi + Wiradjuri artist who has, she said, many slashes in her work résumé, but works mainly in music.

Aunty Kerry Bulloojeeno Archibald Moran, ‘matriarch and medicine woman of Silver City Aboriginal Reserve – the Mission or Mish – on Anaiwan gooten country, Armidale’, sat in the middle, in splendidly colourful clothes and white ochre face paint. In striking physical contrast next to her was Dr Afra Atiq, an Emirati spoken word poet and scholar, dressed in magisterially flowing black. On the other side were two young writers (note that from my perspective anyone under about 50 is young) – Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money (most recent book mark the dawn) and Gunai woman ‘who rarely stays in her lane’ Kirli Saunders (most recent book Eclipse).

Each of the panellists spoke about her relationship to music. None of them owned up to playing a musical instrument, or even singing well, though Auntie Kerry said she always sang in response to the music of the bush that is always here if you listen. Kirli Saunders quoted her mother , ‘Birds in the bush, Babe, birds in the bush,’ meaning that when one bird needs to pause to draw breath the others will carry the song: it’s not all about individual effort in a choir, or in life.

Speaking about her own work, Aunty Kerry said she was inspired by what she reads in books – she produced two from her tote bag, one of which was Granny Duval by Sue Pickrell. She walks in the shadows of other people, she said, and when she reads when becomes the characters, just as in the bush she becomes the kookaburra, magpie, echidna. She performed a poem based on the story in Granny Duval.

Jazz Money spoke of the tension between the impulse to speak and the need to be heard. When she wrote her first book, she had no thoughts of publication. With her second book, she felt th gift of responsibility. As a queer Aboriginal woman, it was something new to expect her voice to be heard. Before she read her poem, ‘ember‘ (you need to scroll down at the link), she said that it was iportant inwith that responsibility not to focus on struggle: ‘The horrors of colonisation are such a tiny part of our story.’ She aims to be part of legacies of joy.

Kirli Saunders took up that theme, saying that though she writes about the stormy places, it’s often in the moment when the storm has passed and the smell of petrichor is everywhere. She performed ‘In the before time’, a poem/dance from the performance piece she is currently developing.

Afra Atiq reminded us that in her work is not reclaiming anything that has been lost, but is part of a continuing tradition, to which she has responsibilities. She performed a poem from her book, Of Palm Trees and Skies. The poem, whose title as best I could scribble it down was ”Six minutes that may be erased today’, was inspired by an art installation in which a mechanical device drew images and then erased them after six minutes. It’s a breathless poem that ends (the line breaks are my guess):

We write because we must
we erase because we think we should.

After the session, these extraordinary women stayed on the stage and generously posed to have group photos taken by a number of intrepid audience members.

12.30: Q & A with Jeanette Winterson in the Patrons Lounge

Thanks to a generous friend, I was a guest at this bonus event. Jeanette Winterson stood on a tiny stage in the Patrons Lounge and answered questions for a little over half an hour. Though some questions came from the munching and sipping patrons, Radio National’s Kate Evans served as excellent stooge, asking questions that elicited a lively story about the origins of Winterson’s first book, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, including the role played by Australian Dale Spender; reflections on the influence of the Manchester of her childhood on her prose (evidently in Manchester, people talk to strangers in the street in staccato, irreverent humour); and about the importance of reading to enable people to broaden their horizons past the confines of their one short life, and to learn how to express themselves in ways without which the main alternative would be violence

I had a break for lunch, and am now having a break from blogging. The afternoon will be another post

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land, where on this day the ground was doing its best to soak up a lot of water. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging, and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog.

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

Posted on 23 May 2025 | 4 comments

While I went home after two sessions on Thursday and wrote my first post about the Festival, the Emerging Artist stayed on at Carriageworks for Anne Summers: 50 Years of Damned Whores and God’s Police.

We debriefed over dinner, then were back into the fray for:

22 May 8 pm: Ittay Flescher: The Holy and the Broken

Michael Visontay sat alone on the stage and interviewed a huge image of Ittay Flescher on a screen behind him.

Ittay Flescher is the Education Director at Kids4Peace Jerusalem, described on the Festival website as an interfaith movement that ‘works to build trust and friendship between Israeli and Palestinian teens’. His response to Visontay’s opening question said a lot about his work. The question included the word ‘conflict’. He said that like many words, that one is itself ‘conflicted’: some hear it as implying two more or less equal sides and so denying the reality of genocide. He listed a number of terms that have radically different meanings depending on your point of view: Holocaust, naqba, Zionism, Muslim, Jew, Christian, Palestinian.

Serendipitously, today (Friday) I saw a T-shirt bearing a poem by Sakr Omar that speaks directly to his point from a Palestinian point of view, it’s one of a series of shirts produced by Readers and Writers against Genocide:

Back to Ittay Flescher. ‘I’m not a politician,’ he said. ‘I wrote the book as an educator.’ And he spent his brief hour educating us. Both Jews and Palestinians have a deep sense of having been oppressed, both with good reason. He sees it as absolutely necessary that the ancient terrors and hatreds born of those brutal histories not to be passed on to the next generation. His work is all about countering the dehumanisation of the Other, and helping people to learn to have open-hearted conversations among people from opposite sides of great divides. He asks: ‘What happened in your life to lead you to believe what you believe, to hold the positions you hold?’ Then he shares his own beliefs and the experience that underlie them. A conversation of this sort doesn’t aim to reach agreement but to recognise the humanity of each other.

He has been called pathetic, naive and delusional by a staunch Zionist journalist, and seen as unbelievably one-sided by some Palestinian activists. But he has many emails from people approaching him as a therapist: ‘I am torn. What should I do?’

If you look at the news, not just from Israel–Palestine but from many places in the world, an understandable response is to despair. In his view, despair leads to more violence. It’s necessary to have a sense of possibility, to have some vision for a resolution where both peoples can live in a secure, just peace. (He didn’t mention Rebecca Solnit, but I was reminded of her argument – I’m paraphrasing from memory – that you can never know what your smallest action in a good direction will lead to, there is never a reason not to have a go.) There’s actually an Egyptian peace proposal on the table that he thinks should be taken up.

That’s a crude condensation of what he had to say. Responding to questions, he made it clear that his work, and his organisation, are part of a peace-building community in Israel and Palestine that includes hundred of organisations and thousands of people.

I bought a copy of his book, The Holy and the Broken: A cry for peace from a land that must be shared. I expect I’ll be writing more about it in time.

The Sydney Writers’ Festival is happening on Gadigal land. I have written this blog post on Gadigal and Wangal land. I acknowledge their Elders past present and emerging. Looking ahead a little, a poet from the United Arab emirates said today (Friday) that she was enjoying the rain. This is glorious, wet country.

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