Last Wednesday, just two days before opening, Bendigo writers’ festival sent its lineup of more than 90 participants an email that would end up derailing the three-day event.
The email contained a code of conduct, including directions to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. Speakers on panels presented by festival sponsor La Trobe University were also required to comply with La Trobe’s anti-racism plan, including the contentious definition of antisemitism adopted by Universities Australia in February.
The response was swift. By Thursday evening, high-profile participants including the Palestinian Australian author and academic Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah and the Stella prize-winning First Nations poet Dr Evelyn Araluen had withdrawn from the festival, citing censorship concerns. And by Friday afternoon, about 30 participants had pulled out, including high-profile authors such as the La Trobe University academic Prof Clare Wright, Paul Daley, Jock Serong, Thomas Mayo and Jess Hill, forcing the cancellation of the opening night address.
On Monday, BWF confirmed to Guardian Australia that 53 participants had withdrawn, resulting in 22 sessions – a third of the program – being cancelled, including the closing ceremony on Sunday night.
The boycott and controversy are the latest in a string of high-profile tussles over freedom of expression involving pro-Palestine artists, including the sacking (and reinstatement) of Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi as Australia’s representative to the Venice Biennale, and the stripping of a government-funded writing fellowship from the First Nations author K A Ren Wyld.
Writers’ festivals have become fraught events, but never before has a backlash been so swift or produced such debilitating results as in Bendigo.
‘A vote of no confidence’
On Monday, the festival said it was still tallying the cost of refunding tickets – but the reputational damage had already been deeply felt. Its founding director, Rosemary Sorensen, accused the festival of exercising an “authoritarian abuse of power”; Noongar author Claire G Coleman called the code of conduct “condescending and insulting”; and Abdel-Fattah, sharing her withdrawal letter on Instagram, wrote: “At a time when journalists are being permanently silenced by Israel’s genocidal forces, it is incomprehensible that a writers’ festival should also seek to silence Palestinian voices.”
Samuel Cairnduff, a lecturer in culture and communication at the University of Melbourne, described the mass withdrawal as “a vote of no confidence in institutional leadership that has forgotten why it exists”.
Abdel-Fattah had been scheduled to appear on a La Trobe-sponsored panel titled On Reckonings, speaking about her new novel Discipline, which reflects on the silencing of Palestinians in academia and the media. “How ironic that they would invite me, knowing what my book is about, on a panel called ‘reckonings’, where I’m going to be discussing a book on silencing Palestinians – and then attempt to silence me,” she told Guardian Australia.
Abdel-Fattah said her withdrawal was more than a matter of principle. After receiving the code of conduct, she believed participating in the BWF “would have resulted … in some kind of media coverage demonising me”. She believes this is part of a larger move to silence Palestinian voices. “[For] most institutions and organisations, it becomes a cost-benefit risk analysis: I become a Palestinian who is dealt with in terms of risk. I’m a risk management crisis.”
A festival spokesperson said: “The City [of Greater Bendigo which runs the festival] and La Trobe University, as the Festival’s Presenting Partner, agreed to issue a one-page Code of Conduct to emphasise the importance of safety and wellbeing for all participants.”
The code of conduct “was never intended to silence anyone, but rather to allow discussions to happen while ensuring the safe participation and inclusion of everyone,” the spokesperson said.
BWF did not respond directly to Guardian Australia’s questions about whether the code of conduct was issued at the request of La Trobe, instead directing questions to the university. Nor did BWF respond to a question about why the code was sent just two days before the festival opened.
A spokesperson for the university said: “La Trobe will always take seriously any concerns raised about community safety and inclusion – including cultural safety – and we welcome feedback on our public events and engagement.”
On Monday, it was revealed that the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, or 5A, group wrote to La Trobe and BWF in July, urging them to “implement immediate measures” concerning the inclusion of Abdel-Fattah; and characterising her as a person who “perpetually dehumanises people who hold Zionist views”. It’s not clear whether the letter played any part in the decision to issue the code of conduct, and La Trobe and BWF refused to comment on the matter.
The risks of risk management
The timing of the email announcing the code has been criticised as well as its content.
“When you consider how long ago I was invited to the festival, [this] was an unacceptably short time to consider such a change,” Coleman said in her letter to the festival, shared on Instagram.
Cairnduff wrote that the festival’s last-minute approach is part of a broader trend of late-stage risk mitigation – “a governance approach that frequently generates greater controversy than it prevents because it fundamentally alters the terms of engagement after commitments have been made”.
Louise Adler, the director of Adelaide Writers’ Week, which has faced criticism and withdrawal of sponsorship over its programming of Palestinian and pro-Palestine authors, says the BWF “debacle” is “symptomatic of the current environment” in the arts.
Other high profile controversies included actors wearing keffiyehs at a Sydney Theatre Company curtain call; pianist Jayson Gillham suing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for cancelling one of his concerts, after he made a statement criticising Israel’s targeting of journalists in Gaza; and the National Gallery of Australia covering up two Palestinian flags in a textile work by the Aotearoa New Zealand collective SaVĀge K’lub.
“We have witnessed a succession of pre-emptive buckles by arts managers second-guessing risk-averse boards who collectively (with management) are concerned about the reputational damage, the withdrawal of desperately needed sponsorship, and the relentless media campaigns that lobby groups can and do orchestrate with the help of News Ltd,” Adler says.
“The arts community needs boards that have courage and [who] understand their role, the importance of curatorial independence and that the artists who choose to work with these organisations are entitled to full-throated and unwavering support.”
Adler says the Adelaide writers’ festival’s code of conduct is limited to “compliance with Australian laws regarding racial discrimination, vilification, hate speech and incitement to violence”.
“During my tenure there has not been a single incident requiring intervention,” she says.
Denis Muller, a senior research fellow with the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, describes the festival’s code of conduct as “extremely vague and oppressive”, one that “no self-respecting journalist or writer is going to adhere to”.
“The body politic in Australia is in the process of recalibrating the whole idea of where moral authority rests in the Middle East. This is a period of transition, and it’s extremely tense,” he says.
In a previous piece for the Conversation, Muller wrote about the “fraught position” writers’ festivals are now in: “They navigate the frontier between social media’s echo chambers of outrage and the traditional public square’s conventions, where restraint, reason and tolerance in the face of opposing views are the basis for civilised debate.”
The lessons from Bendigo
Cairnduff says there are lessons for institutions in how they communicate with and consult artists – but argues a more fundamental reckoning needs to occur. “Arts organisations should be questioning what kinds of restrictions that they – as platforms for creative people – should be imposing,” he says.
“The idea of arts and cultural expression is about freedom of expression and engaging in some of those more challenging and difficult areas of a broader social discourse … restricting speech and freedom of expression – that’s exactly the antithesis of what a cultural organisation in contemporary Australian society should be doing.”
On the opening night of Adelaide writers’ week in 2023, as the festival faced criticism over the inclusion of a Palestinian speaker and a Palestinian-American speaker, the South Australian premier, Peter Malinauskas, admitted he had been under immense pressure to axe its funding – had even considered it – but decided it would set a dangerous precedent if a government determined who was allowed to speak.
“If I was to unilaterally defund writers’ week … what path does that take us down?” he said. “It’s a path to a future where politicians decide what is culturally appropriate … a path, in fact, that leads us into the territory of Putin’s Russia.”
Adler told the Guardian at the time: “These matters are complex. None of this is simple.
“People are free to deeply object. They don’t have to come. Or come, and you don’t need to agree with what people think. But people listened. These steadfast Adelaide audiences came out in their thousands and listened with courtesy and respect for the conversation. It should be something that lifts the spirits of all of us.”
