Is there a way forward for Australia’s cultural life after the cancellation of the 2026 Adelaide writers’ week and all the other controversies played out over the past year, in which the custodians of our culture seem to have crumbled under pressure, only to kinda, sorta and belatedly rally?

I hope so, but it will take a more than rhetorical reflection on what we mean by freedom of speech, and what it requires of us.

As we have seen, defending the right of people to speak, even when we deeply disagree with them, is very, very difficult.

Many people – perhaps most – can’t manage it. It can feel like a betrayal of self, a betrayal of values, and certainly a betrayal of one’s community or cause.

Nor is it sensible to expect it of everyone. But we must demand it of the custodians of our culture. This is the way forward.

Our own problems are, frankly, at the lower end of difficulty. We are, after all, an extraordinarily safe community, even given recent events.

I remember another writers’ festival I attended in Myanmar in 2015, during what proved to be a brief interregnum of a moderately authoritarian regime between brutally repressive ones.

There, among the writers, were those who had cooperated with the previous regime, even written its propaganda, alongside those who had been jailed and tortured by that regime.

Understandably almost every day one group or the other had threatened to walk out if the other were not cancelled. There was nothing cosy or comfortable or culturally “safe” about the exchanges.

Yet the festival proceeded, the........

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