From all sides, writers in Adelaide grieving for social cohesion

For Don Dunstan, Adelaide was, “the Athens of the South” and this year’s Adelaide Writers Week lived up to that billing.

Over six days, some 240 writers shared their thoughts on writing about love, war, loss, inequality, human rights and often, themselves. They shared the joys of gardening, art and architecture and even of watching football. Listening to all this, the audience exuded gratitude.

At the same time, the civility of the park setting was tinged with palpable grief. At a personal level, Geraldine Brooks and others shared their devastation at the sudden loss of their beloved partner/s. Other writers drew on their loss of family and friends as their source of both trauma and inspiration.

At a macro level, there was profound grief that our world has once more become seriously unstable. War and disharmony abound. In Australia, the social cohesion facilitated by 50 years of multiculturalism is dissolving. We are also still reckoning with our colonial past.

The theme of the festival, the third curated by Louise Adler, was Words Matter. Unsurprisingly, the speakers’ views differed about the causes and cures for our current woes. Also unsurprisingly, writers ascribed different meanings to the words they use to make sense of it all, and this was particularly evident in the themes I review here - Zionism, antisemitism and the Holocaust.

Pankaj Mishra, author of The World After Gaza, explained that as a Hindu Indian he started out admiring Israel as model of a strong, cohesive nation with a socialist ethos. No more.  

He argued that the “memorialisation of the Holocaust”, which “exploded’ in the 1990s, gave Jews (especially American Jewry) a foundational narrative for the establishment of the State of Israel and a self-serving “cultivated collective memory” for the West.