It’s a good thing Shakespeare wasn’t invited to Adelaide Writers’ Week

I very much doubt there are Palestinians, Muslims or left-wing class warriors who keep Jewish people out of Sydney’s clubs, private schools and social institutions and laugh at Shylocks with their shaky beards on stage. However, I hope that the next royal commission will not overlook those Australians who, clutching their banners and Southern Crosses, have become the strangest of bedfellows with the enemies of their enemies. Varieties of Australian antisemitism are diverse and, if they can be persuaded to come out of hiding, they are bound to become politically objectionable in the coming months.

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South Australians, meanwhile, can rest easy knowing that their prime minister would have gone beyond his authority to call on the festival chairman to dissuade Shakespeare from inviting him, and that he would not have tried to hide that fact. Even a person as out of his depth as Malinauskas would be on safe ground in writing off that author for an invention like Shylock when dealing with artistic expression.

Unfortunately for Mr. Malinauskas, modern inventions of antisemitism are harder to detect. On Tuesday, he said he had not given any instructions to the festival to dissuade writer Randa Abdel-Fattah from inviting her, but he was of the opinion that it would be better for “social harmony” if she did not attend Writers’ Week. On Wednesday, with almost all guests boycotting the event, the director resigning, the Adelaide Festival board either walking out the door or hitting the road, Writers’ Week ending this year and the wider festival under threat, the prime minister of the “Festival State” was still none the wiser, directly likening Abdel Fattah to the instigator of acts of terrorism and earning himself a libel case.

Even on Thursday, when the new festival board apologized to Abdel-Fattah and issued the first invitations for him to come to Adelaide in 2027, the prime minister, whose exclusion had put him in such a jealous position that he had to say yes to help save the festival, was still clueless. He said he was unaware of any act of defamation. He said his statement about Abdul Fattah was made “from a place of compassion.” He did not give instructions for such a place. But the South Australian election was a week closer. He wanted so badly to leave all this behind.

There is a new crackdown on cultural festivals that are already on their knees. The new Adelaide Festival board is doing its best to repair the damage, but no sane artistic director of a cultural festival anywhere in Australia would let things go as far as they did in Adelaide. Writers who are considered to threaten “social integration” and “cultural security” will not be left uninvited; Their hopes of being invited will rapidly diminish and be overshadowed by “risk management”. Artistic directors who lose their autonomy for fear of authoritarian boards will resign and more festivals will be lost to boycott as no collection of writers or artists will escape the dragnet of “social harmony” enforcement.

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Or, to put it another way, any collection of writers or artists who universally meet the “social harmony” code of conduct is not worth listening to. To save a festival in Adelaide, writers had to destroy it. In order to destroy their festivals in the future, the organizers will try to save them in advance.

In the end, Adelaide’s festival was saved by money: artists with financial clout. British band Pulp threatened to cancel their free concert unless they received an apology from Abdel-Fattah. With disaster looming, forget Writers’ Week, the Pulp concert might not happen! – The festival apologized. Malinauskas, still full of compassion, refused mercy.

“The quality of mercy does not stretch/It falls from the sky like a light rain/It is doubly blessed to the ground beneath/It blesses both the giver and the receiver.”

I can still see Matthew W in his Portia make-up singing some of Shakespeare’s wisest and most beautiful words. They contain every grain of hope we can find. It’s a shame that these were written by a canceled antisemite. But little is as it seems when escalated by smiling politicians and others seeking to escalate tensions who think history began 28 months ago. Oh, what a beautiful external lie there is.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist. Sydney Morning Herald.

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