Adelaide Writers' Week

Chair: Richard Fidler

In The Passion of Private White, bestselling author Don Watson describes the fifty-year relationship between an isolated clan in northern Arnhem Land and Neville White, an anthropologist and Vietnam War veteran. It is a window into our history, as a complex set of contradictions, conflicts and degrees of recognition between coloniser and colonised unfold. Watson talks about this encounter between two worlds and the story of human adaptation, suffering and resilience evident in both.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 3:45pm on the East Stage

Chair: David Nolan

Australians are now engaged in a national conversation about a change to the constitution to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the First Nations of Australia and create a Voice to Parliament. It's been a struggle of decades - first in 1967, for the right be counted in the census, and now to be consulted about policies that impact First Nations people. In the lead up to the referendum, Natalie Ahmat, Jack Latimore and Jodan Perry, three of our leading Indigenous journalists, discuss the challenges in covering the Voice, meeting audience expectations and battling audience fatigue.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 2:30pm on the East Stage

Chair: Steve Bracks

It is a truism that political memoirs are an invaluable first draft of history. Are political biographies equally unreliable and imprecise? Are living subjects more problematic than dead ones? Former Victorian Premier Steve Bracks explores the genre with some of Australia’s leading journalists – Sumeyya Ilanbey (biographer of Daniel Andrews), Chris Wallace and Margot Saville.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 1:15pm on the East Stage

Chair: Maxine McKew

Fintan O’Toole is one of Ireland’s leading public intellectuals, as a columnist for The Irish Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and The Guardian and as the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor in Irish Letters at Princeton University. Through his writing, O’Toole has provided some of the sharpest critiques of post-Brexit Britain. His most recent book, We Don’t Know Ourselves, is a brilliantly original account of the making of modern Ireland from the dead hand of the Catholic Church to the legalisation of gay marriage.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 12:00pm on the East Stage

Chair: Nicole Abadee

In The Book of Roads & Kingdoms, Richard Fidler charts the story of the medieval travellers who journeyed to the edges of the known world during Islam’s Golden Age, travelling through China, India, Africa and Byzantium. In conversation with Nicole Abadee, he talks about the flourishing cultural life of Imperial Baghdad, the literary accounts of its wanderers and the devastating fall of this dazzling lost world.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 10:45am on the East Stage

Chair: Louise Adler / Translator: Elena Mikhailik

Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel Laureate, has been credited with the invention of a new literary genre: a “novel of voices“, a documentary prose in which individuals record their own personal and political histories. If Alexievich is writing “a history of the soul“, it’s a soul that is forged in crisis – be it the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan or the collapse of the USSR. In 2018, she was awarded the Anna Politkovskaya Award from RAW in WAR, an organisation founded by human rights leader Mariana Katzarova. In this conversation, they discuss the imperative to document truth.

Event details: Sat 04 Mar, 9:30am on the East Stage

Chaired by Victoria Purman

CW: Discussion of abortion. A bestseller in Sue Orr’s New Zealand, Loop Tracks is complex, nuanced and compassionate. Written in real time against the progress of COVID, it opens in Auckland in 1978 as Charlie waits to board a flight to Australia to have an abortion, the sole NZ clinic recently closed. When the plane is delayed on the tarmac, she makes an impulsive choice, the consequences of which are profound. We learn of Charlie then, and in contemporary COVID NZ, where she lives with her grandson and the spectre of her troubled stranger of a son.

Chaired by Nicole Abadee

The twins at the heart of Campbell Mattinson’s deeply moving We Were Not Men suffer great tragedy and risk losing themselves and their vital relationship in the aftermath. Hannah Bent’s wondrous When Things Are Alive They Hum is a celebration of life and the profound connection between sisters, in this case the ambitious professional Marlowe and the captivating Harper, who has Down Syndrome, and is one of the most magical characters of the year.

Chaired by Natasha Yacoub

2021 marked twenty years since Australia sent the Special Air Service to board MV Tampa to repel desperate refugees and a horrified Norwegian sea captain. Abbas Nazari (After the Tampa) was aboard, ended up in New Zealand and is now a Fulbright scholar. Jaivet Ealom (Escape from Manus) fled the brutal dictatorship in Myanmar only to languish in Australia’s notorious Manus Regional Processing Centre for years. He became the only person to escape. They talk about the real consequences of Australia’s dark actions.

Chaired by Peter Rose

The Education of Young Donald trilogy is Donald Horne’s autobiographies — The Education of Young Donald (1967), Confessions of a New Boy (1985) and Portrait of an Optimist (1988). They’re the story of an Australian prophet; his years away from home, the gallery of characters he meets on the journey, the “successes that were failures and failures that were successes”, and his unexpected emergence as a voice of the nation. Seventeen years after his passing, analysis of his legacy feels timely in a country still dumbly surfing on its luck.