There was a lot less mud and a lot more walking at this year’s glorious celebration of words, the Byron Writers Festival, which took place in a series of venues around Byron Bay over the last three days.
Such a cornucopia is impossible to distil to a few paragraphs, so what follows are a few highlights, in vaguely chronological order. One highlight was Kerry O’Brien’s Thea Astley Address ‘Lessons from History’, where he shared the stage with Booker-winner Richard Flanagan. We’ll have a special report on that tomorrow, along with further coverage of events across the weekend.
Most venues across the festival were packed to enthusiastic capacity, with the general consensus that the move into town was a great success, especially as the rain started falling across the weekend.
On Friday, Radio National’s Richard Fidler gave an interviewing masterclass in his conversation with publishing legend Louise Adler, covering everything from her family’s Holocaust history up to the recent dramas surrounding Adler’s attempt to bring a Palestinian perspective to the last Adelaide Writers’ Week, which led to political interference and ultimately the destruction of the event after a boycott from 180 authors in support of Adler.
New writers were well supported at the Byron festival, with a series of events focusing on the fast-changing world of self-publishing, which has gone from being the poor relation of the publishing world to the main event, in some cases.
Back in the big tent, an event honouring the mighty contributions of Mungo MacCallum to the craft of journalism saw a conversation between Sean Kelly and Antoinette Lattouf, with Niki Savva unable to attend and Mandy Nolan stepping in as chair at short notice to replace Nour Haydar.
After idealistic beginnings as a young journalist, Lattouf later found herself cancelled by the ABC after daring to report a Human Rights Watch post on local radio, then won against her former employer when the case went to court.
In an era where politics has become more about performance than policy, and many journalists have become embedded in one way or another, the panel remembered Mungo’s ability to cut through political nonsense. His widow Jenny Garrett spoke about his fury about the large space created for lobbyists when the federal parliament moved up the hill.
The blurring of commentary and reporting was lamented, along with the loss of experienced rounds reporters and the way breaking news and commentary have replaced in-depth investigation as newsroom budgets have been cut. Mandy Nolan spoke up for publications like The Echo, as regional media increasingly goes the way of the dodo across Australia.
The audience asked why there was so little solidarity among journalists when one of their number came under attack from powerful lobby groups. Lattouf blamed a culture of fear, saying she faced a very lonely road when she was suspended, with colleagues afraid even to text or email her in case those documents were subpoenaed. She said she had been crucified as a warning to others, particularly women and people who weren’t white.
At the end of the session, Mandy invited the audience to get their books signed at the old vistors centre. ‘Not for old visitors, but that is the demographic!’
Bob Carr
In a panel about Trump’s America, former NSW premier and federal foreign minister Bob Carr spoke about the stealthy build up of connections between Australia and the US defence machine without any attempt to ask the Australian people what they thought of this.
Beyond submarines, Julianne Schultz spoke about the little-discussed AUKUS Pillar Two, which will lead to a much greater American military presence in this country, along with a militarisation of Australian industry.
Lowy Institute research was discussed which shows a historic collapse of trust in the USA from Australians under Trump Mk II, particularly since the Iran war. After years of relative stability, that trust number is now even lower than China’s. At the same time, and in a parallel universe, half of the people in this country who describe themselves as One Nation voters think positively of Donald Trump.
On the right side of politics, the panel anticipated an Andrew Hastie-led opposition in the near future, in some kind of coalition with One Nation, injecting a ‘chaotic poison’ into Australian politics. They noted that Pauline Hanson and her fellow travellers are using a well-defined international playbook for right wing populism, which has learned from its successes and failures elsewhere. As one speaker said, ‘this is a global language and she is now the local avatar’.
Political commentator and sometimes insider George Megalogenis described Australia as a ‘majority minority country’, a striking new way of looking at multiculturalism.
Bob Carr said this country’s greatest achievement is our glorious diversity. Now the extreme right here and elsewhere are talking about deporting anyone not of ‘pure blood’, generationally, an idea which has some actual precedent here, among South Sea Islanders brought out to work in canefields and descendants of German immigrants at the time of World War I, including the boss of Reschs brewery and the Surgeon General of Queensland at the time.
As for the United States, Bob Carr said the situation would inevitably get worse, with the prospect of President JD Vance – who refused to meet the democratic leaders of Germany but was happy to meet Nazi-adjacent Alternative for Deutschland – a particular worry. He said Trump’s vision of a G2 (America and China carving up the world) would leave Australia high and dry, with Mafia-style shakedowns of other countries increasingly leading the rest of the world to work out how to live without the USA, and new alliances emerging as American vulnerability is revealed.
The panel agreed that Australia remains fundamentally different to America, with a need to focus on the best elements of what it means to be Australian, and fight for our individuality, as the world becomes more dangerous, and the USA collapses.
Louise Milligan
Taking a break from her hard-hitting exposes on Four Corners and elsewhere, Irish-Australian author Louise Milligan was promoting her new novel Shellybanks at the BWF, in conversation with Angela Catterns at the surf club, as whales cavorted in the background.
Blending crime fiction and personal history, this book is Milligan’s second novel, and set in Ireland, from where she had just returned. After endless attacks from the Murdoch media and others for her work on the crimes of Cardinal Pell and others, Milligan said she was pleased to report she was ‘still standing’, and smiling for good measure, though there were also a few tears from the author and her interviewer as the session continued.
It was back to the big tent on Jonson Street at the end of Day 1 for a discussion on ‘what Labor stands for’, from Sean Kelly, who ought to know, having worked for Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Anthony Albanese, before going back on the other side of the fence to report on politics for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
Kelly took the scheduling of his session with Julianne Schultz in the dying light of the day as a metaphor for Australian Labor, which he said had faced a crisis after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which led to socialism becoming a dirty word, and then the rise of the Greens, who captured the purity corner.
He noted that Anthony Albanese’s words revealed a fundamentally conservative and negative world view, founded on fighting others (particularly Greens and Tories), and preserving hard fought-for past victories (such as Medicare), rather than pursuing bold new goals.
Kelly said that when the party lost its internal struggle between pragmatists and idealists it lost a lot of the country too, with ‘progressive patriotism’ failing to become the rallying cry Albo hoped for.
Like other Labor parties around the world, Kelly said the ALP was finding it impossible to break free from fundamentally neo-Liberal beliefs, which were failing to help the working people the party was created for.
‘Labor now rewards loyalty not imagination,’ he said, with small, incremental steps breeding nothing but cynicism from the electorate. Beyond Labor, Kelly said that most politicians were reluctant to talk about big problems, because if they name them they have to solve these problems or be blamed for them.
The Echo‘s Byron Writers Festival coverage continues tomorrow.
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