The Adelaide Writers’ Week collapsed long before its director Louise Adler made her belated heroic stand and resigned.
The Festival board disinvited Randa Abdel-Fattah, then watched the programme haemorrhage as around 180 writers and speakers withdrew, leaving the event untenable and ultimately cancelled.
Adler apparently vehemently disagreed with the board’s decision when it was made.
However it took almost a week before she finally resigned in protest, and only after most of her invited guests had already pulled out.
That’s what you call leading from behind.
Adler’s formal resignation came via a theatrically titled open letter published in The Guardian, declaring she ‘cannot be party to silencing writers’.
Eventually that was true. Although let’s be honest, these festivals silence voices they don’t ideologically agree with by omission all the time. Their programs don’t even pretend to display balanced content.
Adler wants her late breaking move framed as martyrdom for free speech, but by the time she found her line in the sand the festival had already been torched by a mass walkout.
Randa Abdel-Fattah with Antoinette Lattouf, Craig Foster and Anthony Loewenstein during the pro-Palestine march over the Sydney Harbour Bridge
The entire writers’ event was cancelled after a slew of resignations after Abdel-Fattah was disinvited from the festival
Standing on principle only after a stampede doesn’t feel like much of a stand. For it to mean anything at all, wouldn’t resigning the moment the board overturned your programming choice have been the right time? Rather than after the zeitgeist crystallised and it became untenable not to resign?
As for the rhetoric the now ex-festival director used in her published resignation? She didn’t merely criticise a board decision, she cited grand national decline: ‘Joe McCarthy would be cheering’, ‘welcome to Moscow on the Torrens’, the board decision is a ‘harbinger of a less free nation’ and she is ‘the canary in the coalmine’. Her ominous ending was: ‘they are coming for you’.
Turning a bungled governance call in little old Adelaide into the last stand of civilisation feels like attention-seeking performative nonsense.
So has Louise been prone to exaggeration in the past? Not always.
In sharp contrast to her festival resignation Adler reportedly used a speech in April last year to mock concerns in the Jewish community about rising antisemitism and threats of violence. That was before the Bondi terrorist attack by the way.
She said the fears were ‘wildly exaggerated’ and ‘you might actually believe that we are three minutes away from a new Kristallnacht’.
What a relaxed contrast with her resignation letter warnings!
Louise Adler is being hailed as a hero for her belated exit as director of the Adelaide Writers’ Week
Irrespective of where anyone sits on Abdel-Fattah and her suitability to be invited to the Adelaide event, Adler’s programming choice was never designed to go unnoticed
Abdel-Fattah dismissing reports of sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 as ‘rape atrocity propaganda’ – despite the UN finding ‘patterns indicative of sexual violence… primarily against Israeli women’ – isn’t a reason to not invite someone to a festival of ideas, in the eyes of some.
The fuse was lit, the festival blew up and Adler is now unemployed. I’m sure she’ll find another platform soon enough,
The mass ‘Me Too’ series of pull-outs that preceded Adler’s last minute principled follow on stand was the perfect case study in why parts of the arts community can be so maddening: maximalist moral posturing, sanctimony by press release, and collective attention seeking dressed up as virtue.
Add a gulp of hypocrisy to that mix: Abdel-Fattah tried to de-platform New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman from the 2024 Festival.
To be fair to Adler she resisted that demand. To be fair to Friedman, he’s no Abdel-Fattah.
