My name has been invoked many times in public since the Adelaide Writer’s Week literary scandal broke. Rather than remain a silent bystander I have written my thoughts about the events.
The Adelaide Festival Board canceled author Randa Abdul-Fattah’s appearance from the program since it came to its attention that her “historic” comments (including that there should be no cultural safety for Zionists anywhere), jarred with the slaughter of 15 people, the Zionists, at Bondi Beach.
The race to take the side of freedom of speech above all other considerations was swift and comprehensive; 180 writers rushing for the exit, the door slamming resignation of Director Louise Adler and the face saving gush of more than half the board quitting. And then like a bungee jumper, the dizzying speed of the reversal of (mis)fortune, a new board appointed, apologising to both Abdul- Fattah & Adler & inviting the former to be part of the 2027 Adelaide Writer’s Week, regardless of who becomes the new Director.
Within hours of all this, revelations of insider 2024 board discussions circling around Adler’s insistence that the Board retract the invitation to author, prize winning New York Times journalist and Jew, Thomas Friedman, became public. The call was fuelled by a letter, signed by Abdul-Fattah, demanding Friedman not be programmed as retributive justice in response to an opinion piece he’d written for the New York Times. Friedman was duly brushed off with scheduling issues & his invitation retracted.
That these events have generated so much newsprint, TV, radio, blog posts, Substacks, podcasts & so on, is not just because it’s summertime. After all there is the Iranian revolution, the Maduro extraction and countless other remarkable stories swirling round the planet. But this literary scandal has held its own against those massive headline grabbing stories because any sane human being looking at the facts can see the blinding hypocrisy, the lying depravity and duplicitous betrayal the protagonists are trading in
and is struggling to understand how those involved have become so deluded.
My name has been invoked because in February 2024 I was booked by the Perth Writer’s Festival (Writing WA) to speak over three sessions about the book I had just written.
In January I started receiving some nervous calls from the organisers in the vein of “don’t worry, we’ll work everything out”. When I interrogated what I should not be worried about, the answers were opaque. A few days later I was eventually apprised of a letter circulating that was demanding Perth Writer’s Festival drop me from their speakers schedule.
Entitled “Perth Festival and Writing WA’s decision to platform Deborah Conway causes suffering for Palestinians: an open letter from Australian writers and artists”, the letter would eventually garner 500 signatories, including Abdul-Fattah’s. To Writing WA’s credit it stood by its decision to book me and tried to ameliorate the pitchfork squad by including more diverse authors in the program. That and a lot of security.
The first two sessions were sold out. The 3rd session was infiltrated by placard carrying, flag waving disruptors who delighted in screaming abuse at me, through their masks. The moderator and I were rushed offstage and the protesters were escorted from the room. FYI my book is a memoir of an Australian musician not a treatise on Middle East relations.
I had inadvertently attracted a lynch mob after an interview exchange with the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas where I said that Hamas was putting guns in the hands of underage soldiers and then counting them in their casualty lists, an unusually cruel form of child abuse. A few words of this exchange were taken out of context and twisted to infer that I discounted Palestinian children’s lives and endorsed genocide. It set the pattern for the vilification, harassment and concerted, and sometimes successful, efforts to have me cancelled from any and all public appearances over the next two years.
While I was enduring the calumny of the confected accusations across multiple platforms, online and in person, there was not a single show of support for free speech from my colleagues.
When venues started cancelling, no-one in the music industry took a principled stand. No organisation made a statement against the bullying. When protesters bought tickets to our performance in Hobart and timed their protests at 20 minute intervals for maximum disruption, the local ABC host asked listeners the following morning if I had the right to perform a show without interruption.
Not one person in the Australian music scene was prepared to go public to counter the witch hunt; nothing from Creative Australia, formerly The Australia Council, for whom I had spent several years on the music panel; nothing from Mushroom Records which I was signed to for a decade or so; nothing from Musician’s Australia, part of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance which might have thought it was in its remit.
Met with mostly stoney opprobrium, I got to the point where I was surprised to receive any sympathetic private messages. Not that it was just about me. I was only one of many Jewish creatives brought to our knees by the regular outbreaks of hostility and cancelling.
The music business, musicians, creatives more broadly, are tribal. It’s not about the principle, it’s about appearing to adhere to the side; it’s not about injustice, it’s about cheering on the approved cause; it’s not about nuance, it’s about power and it’s certainly not about freedom of speech, it’s about cancelling the speech of whomever you don’t agree with. Ultimately it is the revelation that a totalitarian, fascistic group-think has a grip on the arts sector and people are fearful to express themselves even if they profoundly disagree.
As an aside, on January 5th my husband Willy Zygier and I wrote a letter in support of a Royal Commission, to which we attempted to recruit creatives to sign. Most of the brave, free thinking artists stalled, not knowing what to do even though large swathes of the
community, including judges, sports people, the intelligence and security sector amongst others, knew it was the right thing to do and had put their names to letters urging the Albanese government to go ahead.
After a week we had only managed to get nine affirmatives. Including the two of us.
I do not believe cancelling is an answer to anything. It’s an ugly counter productive tactic; far better to invite a broader diversity of voices to the table to thrash out, in good faith or otherwise, the contentious, sometimes bitter opposing views that exist. The recently departed Director of Adelaide Writers Festival did not seem to run with that approach. When it came to the Middle East Adler seems to have booked only writers with her approved view. Many of Abdul-Fattah’s public pronouncements since October 7, 2023, have been reprehensible and in these fevered times, a different Artistic Director might have thought it inappropriate to offer her an invitation to AWW 2026, but it was Adler’s call. The best way forward, now the new board is showing its commitment to free speech by re-inviting her, would be to platform Zionist voices, perhaps even to re-invite Friedman alongside Abdul-Fattah. Alas, the first foot appears to be the wrong one.