“Due to South Australian health regulations, I’d like to remind you all to please socially distance wherever possible.”
The MC’s announcement drew dry chuckles from the crowd, packed hip to hip (though mainly masked) under the bright blue shade cloths in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden in Adelaide.
While floods ravaged the east coast of Australia, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified, and an Australian cricket legend died too young, here, in a small pocket of grass just south of the River Torren, we were gathered in the blissfully dry heat to begin the first day of the 2022 Adelaide Writers’ Week, optimistically titled “A Better Picture”.
While every session begins with a COVID warning and volunteers in green shirts patiently guide the, er, older crowd through the check-in process, the pandemic did not feature heavily in this year’s line-up. Instead, mere months before a much-anticipated election and in the midst of multiple crises, we found ourselves in a hotbed of political discourse and activism right in the centre of Adelaide.
The dynamic duo of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull kicked it off by going straight for the throat of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
“The meat and potatoes, the basics of government, are competence and integrity, and Scott has shown himself to be lacking in both of them,” said Turnbull.
Was there a Liberal voter in the crowd? I doubt it. Not a single swipe at the country’s leadership dropped on this audience throughout the week without hearty applause.
But the speakers who moved us to silence were those who went deeper to reveal the systemic injustices that lie interconnected at the heart of the biggest problems we face.
Strong themes quickly emerged. Climate change. Racial injustice. Gender equality and sexual violence. And the stunning lack of integrity of the people who run the country.
Activist and former deputy leader of the Greens Scott Ludlam spoke of the state capture in Australia and around the world that keeps our leaders in the pockets of fossil fuel companies that are destroying our planet. Systems researchers, he said, have noticed how physical systems like earthquakes share similarities with social movements. Understanding and harnessing the power of these social movements can help us win the fight against these leaders who refuse to act on climate change.
The government’s war on whistleblowers was centre stage as Bernard Collaery and David McBride, with Jennifer Robinson, lawyer for Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, outlined the danger of a government that wields the weapon of secrecy with impunity.
“They want to put me to trial over something that they want to publicly deny, and are publicly denying,” Collaery said. “They want a secret trial — because to try me, they have to admit what was done.”
“I don’t want to live in a democracy where a lawyer who is doing his job is prosecuted. That is a terrifying precedent,” Robinson said.
The urgency of speaking truth to power came up again when former Australian of the Year Grace Tame took the stage to talk about the need to change the “ecosystem of abuse” that exists around survivors of child sexual assault — an ecosystem that remains intact largely because of those who are willingly or unwillingly silenced.
She called on her packed-out audience to stop standing by in silence and letting those in power get away with abusing it: “You don’t have to participate in this … mindless abuse culture just for the sake of civility.”
On stage with Tame, Jess Hill, investigative journalist and author of See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control and Domestic Abuse, took up the cry, saying that together we can force change, not just in the world of child abuse and sexual violence, but beyond it — to change the culture that sees us stand by while climate change disasters threaten our survival.
Hill was brought to tears describing her terror at watching the floods unfolding in south-east Queensland and NSW: “This is the system we are living in. It’s all interconnected. Instead of letting the world go off a cliff we are going to have to salvage it back.”
Novelists may have added fiction to the week, but they didn’t shy away from the hard topics. Rape culture at university campuses, trauma and abuse in out-of-home care, and the morality of fighting fire with fire were all up for discussion through a fictional lens. And they brought much-needed moments of joy too, such as when Trent Dalton, author of Love Stories, insisted the crowd join him in a rendition of All You Need is Love.
But audience questions always dragged them back to reality. How can your words create change? What is the importance of stories of hope and solidarity in a world that desperately needs it? What can we all do, now, to make a difference?
For a week in Adelaide, we were in a bubble while much of the country was suffering. But the suffering wasn’t lost on anyone there. Rather it added fire and urgency to the messages being shared in the garden by the Torrens.
