The final day of my 2026 Byron Writers Festival went from John Howard’s pernicious effect on Australia to poetry in the dark; from being funny about serious things to first time writers made good, and finally to the story of a wrongful conviction for murder.
In ‘The Case Against John Howard’, Amy Remeikis revealed that Howard’s superpower was unwavering self belief. Before he became a patron saint of the conservatives, and a leader who never once wavered from the pursuit of what he wanted, Howard was the perpetual loser of the Liberal Party. Later, bumbling around in tracksuits ‘like an off duty Mr Sheen… he was so impressively mediocre.’
Remeikis suggested it was a misconception to think Howard took off his political animal suit and became Mr Average when he became PM, and a myth that he was a collegiate Cabinet member. She said he listened to everyone but only pursued what he already wanted to do, even if it took him years.
To the public, John Howard looked like a grandpa. How dangerous could he be? As it turns out, very dangerous. In his mind, the ordinary Australian was a white, male, middle-aged conservative. Howard’s ‘battlers’ wanted to get ahead. He gave them enemies to blame: migrants, Aboriginal people, inner city latte sippers and Chardonnay drinkers. Anyone with an arts degree had to be a communist. Intellectualism was re-badged as political correctness.
Coming after Keating’s reach forward to Asia, and back to reconcile with Australia’s past, the fear of these changes among some Australians helped John Howard. With the assistance of Crosby Textor, everything had to go through the imaginary prism of ‘Phil and Jenny’, representing the aspirational voters he was targeting. Howard went for working class voters and told them unions were evil, convincing them housing investments were the way to get ahead, and set up the culture wars we’re still wasting time fighting today.
According to Amy Remeikis, John Howard thought people believed whatever story you told them as prime minister, and accepted whatever he defined as being unAustralian. Modern Australians were not to blame (or feel guilty) for what happened in colonial history. Don Bradman and ANZAC Day were elevated. Naysayers were divided and conquered. The idea was that ‘Australia is what we say it is and anybody who says something different is the enemy.’
Remeikis and Sean Kelly agreed that Howard was completely shameless, refused to apologise (that was also unAustralian), and fervently believed in what he was doing: the ultimate conviction politician.
The only thing he claimed regretting was wearing a gun vest when he announced his changes to gun laws following the Port Arthur massacre.
Racist to the core, Howard didn’t believe in boycotting South African cricket during apartheid, spoke against Vietnamese refugees under Malcolm Fraser, and was uncomfortable with the concept of multiculturalism, going on record with his assertion that the Cronulla race riots weren’t about race.
Although he ultimately lost his own seat, along with the government, and set his beloved Liberal Party on a self-destructive path, Liberals still go to John Howard for advice. Go figure!
Howard and Hanson
Amy Remeikis reminded the audience that Pauline Hanson was disendorsed by the Liberals under Andrew Peacock in 1996 for her racist views (this was a time when both sides enforced the government policy, in existence since the 1980s, that Australia is a multicultural nation). Hanson won anyway.
While other prime ministers stood against Hanson’s obvious racism. Howard didn’t, saying ‘Isn’t it wonderful people now have the freedom to say what they think?’ He only put her last when she started threatening Liberal seats. He allowed Hanson to push the Overton Window in that direction by standing back while she said the racist things he couldn’t, and encouraging voters to put the Liberals second if they put One Nation First. This treatment allowed her to remain a threat from thirty years ago until today.
Remeikis went on to explain Howard’s hypocrisy on immigration, maximising cheap temporary labour to help bosses and weaken unions, while simultaneously demonising asylum seekers, who were a very small cohort of the overall immigration numbers.
She said that when Liberals want to be racist they always have to dress it up as something else, currently that’s housing. His changes to capital gains tax immediately caused housing prices to rise, which meant Howard’s battlers now felt richer because their houses were worth more.
As Amy Remeikis and other speakers reminded audiences across the festival, housing supply is keeping up with population growth. It’s a supply problem. The fact that house prices went up in 2020 while there was no migration proves that immigration is not the issue.
All in all, Howard convinced the nation that thinking about politics was what was wrong with politics. Remeikis said this has to change, because politics reaches into everything. While you might be relaxed and comfortable, many people aren’t, and the climate crisis is going to make everything steadily worse.
She said Howard’s key idea, of making some Australians believe they were at risk of losing something if anyone else gained something (land rights, immigrants etc) has to be recognised as being fundamentally flawed.
Amy Remeikis finished by saying she wished more people cared about politics and had higher expectations of their leaders. After all these years, the flawed, failed and dangerous ideas of John Howard and his proxies, such as Pauline Hanson and Angus Taylor, should no longer be driving Australia.
Part time poetry
Poet Evelyn Araluen’s session with Grace Lucas-Pennington took place in the atmospheric surroundings of Haven Gallery. 2022 Stella Prize-winner Araluen told the audience she ‘occasionally writes books but doesn’t think of herself as a writer’.
She said her poetry wasn’t nihilistic, but designed to go on protest signs and encourage action.
Not a natural speaker, the reason for the excitement about her two collections (Dropbear and The Rot) only became obvious when she read the poems themselves, which dealt with themes including watching genocide on social media, mourning lost Elders and interrogating primitivist colonial fantasies of Australia.
While Evelyn Araluen said she still wasn’t quite sure what poetry was, and her own mother didn’t read her work because it didn’t rhyme, she definitely found some new fans at this festival.
Being funny about serious stuff
Over in the packed-out Byron Theatre, Michael Winkler introduced his fellow novelist by saying, ‘I come to bury Steve Toltz, not to praise him’, lamenting that Toltz’s writing made his own wife shake with laughter as she read him.
After four novels, Toltz said he still feels like he writes for himself, and found it difficult when people said they’d read his books. ‘Any artistic endeavour is embarrassing, to think your thoughts are worth thinking or writing’ – although he did admit that publication helped proved that there was more involved than empty delusions of grandeur.
The hero of his new book, A Rising of the Lights, is a lonely loser who goes through hell, rejected by everyone including his own twin sister. Toltz explained that he liked books which were built on strong intellectual philosophical foundations, but were also funny.
‘Ultimately I’m interested in why we behave the way we behave.’ Toltz said fear was the motivating force of the characters in his first three novels (of death, suffering, the opinions of others), while the new book was more about the nature of consciousness.
Tradition is the illusion of permanence. Friendships are lifeboats. Reading is inhaling, while writing is exhaling. Read Gogol, Borges and Sherwood Anderson. These were some of the takeaways from this entertaining session.
First and second novels, breaking through
A session sponsored by Adelaide’s MUD Literary Club explored the highly personal first novels of Romy Ash, Trent Dalton and Antoun Issa, and what each of those works led to.
The authors spoke about the joys and terrors of bringing very personal family stories into the public eye, the differences between writing novels and journalism (and how each can inform the other), the weirdness of finding their works adapted to the screen and stage, and the importance of early recognition via festivals and prizes to give new voices the courage to continue.
As the writers said, the hope is that people will read your work and make it a springboard for their own adventures.
Wrongly convicted?
My final session featured the true crime writers and journalists Debbie Whitmont and Matthew Condon in conversation, with a focus on Whitmont’s new book about the assassination of Labor politician John Newman in Cabramatta in 1994, which happened at another time of moral panic about immigration.
Years of work and multiple interviews with everyone concerned have convinced Whitmont that the conviction of the man accused of being responsible for ordering the hit and now serving a life sentence was ‘unsafe’, at the very least, and should be revisited. In any case, it’s clear that the person who actually shot Newman has never been caught.
For the politicians who helped put the supposed killer in prison, and those who could have spoken up but chose not to, such as Graham Richardson, the man languishing in prison may have been no more than a ‘blip’, but Four Corners journalist Debbie Whitmont decided there was more to this story, and years later she’s shared what she’s found with the world.
Her revelations about the workings of the NSW Crime Commission, apparently a law unto itself, are particularly disturbing. Whitmont’s book is called The Man Who Couldn’t Wait.
The festival finale featured Janet Swain’s Big Voice Choir singing up a storm with former Goanna frontman Shane Howard and Benja Roberts.
With six or seven events happening all the time over three days across Byron Bay, the 2026 edition of the Byron Writers Festival was a different experience for everyone who attended, and a triumph after the rained-out muddy disappointment of 2025.
You can find our coverage of Day 1 here. Reporting of Kerry O’Brien’s memorable Thea Astley Address is available here. There is also coverage of Day 2 here.
Bring on 2027!
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