The history of our time will be recorded in split-screen. It will be an epoch of noise. An era defined by its reaction to itself; the fact-check recheck, interpretation speculation, 'vitriolic, patriotic, slam fight, bright light' TV talkback hour.
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In that era of constant speech, of endless like-and-subscribe debate and 24-hour analysis - in that long death rattle of irony - silence is not golden; it's dangerous. And the few places left where it is tolerated will be quickly termed radical.
"What do we stand for?" the Newcastle Writers Festival director, Rosemarie Milsom, asks almost a year after she refused to remove two writers from the program in 2024.
The annual event had fallen that year around escalating social tensions over a renewed war in the Middle East, sparking a both-sides social media furore over the festival program that, for the first time in the event's history, had necessitated plain-clothes police mingle among the bibliophiles, ready to keep the peace.
Milsom knew she had touched a nerve when the emails began - mostly copy-pasted repeats in a constant barrage that smacked of a coordinated effort. Then, the social media feeds for what was usually a politically benign event were overwhelmed by complaints. And then, the complaints turned to threats.
"Some people feel very compelled and ready to shout," Milsom says as she reflects on it now, a little more than a fortnight out from the 2025 Newcastle Writers Festival that kicked off on Friday, April 4.
"There was a push to remove two writers from the program, but we did not do that. We would not remove an artist because people don't agree with them. To just discard writers because of pressure is a dangerous path. If we buckled to the pressure, then what? What do we stand for?"
It was unfamiliar territory for the festival, which - like most other writers and book festivals around the country - had enjoyed a relatively off-radar space in the political minefield, detached from the interpretation-speculation dogfight of it all, but able to comment and take the long view from the airlock all the same.
They would be labelled by some as elitist - stuffy spaces for left-wing academics and the ivory tower intelligentsia - but in practice, writers festivals are like libraries wrought in real-time. They ask little, rarely try to persuade, and are built for the casual browser. They are one of the few places left that welcome the happily or defiantly unaligned - the doubters and the sceptics, the wonderers and the dabblers. They are spaces for readers, made by readers, largely to promote and sell books.
They make for poor coliseums.
But as the world outside races to the hardened edges, spurred on by the commercialisation of rage online and the new forever war of politics as a self-perpetuating sport, the spaces where opinions are never firmly held - where doubt is a public exercise to be entertained rather than eliminated - become stark by their contrast. If everyone outside is yelling, the civil silence in these few events becomes deafening.
"There are moments when it can feel quite bleak, the outlook for the state of the world," Milsom says, as she rattles off the litany of modern crises that dominate and lap over each other in the constant tempest of the information age; COVID, economic crisis, the lurch of the United States towards authoritarianism, Ukraine, Palestine, climate change, Trump, grocery prices.
"If you are engaged in the world, you are aware of all these issues, and I think what writers festivals are doing is an antidote to that kind of yelling and intolerance," she says.
Milsom never wants to go through the gauntlet of last year's event again. It was intimidating, she says, and distressing. It was exhausting. But in as much as she says she has no desire to debate or engage with the social media mob, she still grapples with trying to understand the motivation behind the backlash.
"What was the end goal?" she asks. "I was born in Bosnia. I have lost relatives in the war in Bosnia. I understand genocide at close range; I have experienced it in my family ... I understood where that emotion was coming from - what we were witnessing in Palestine was harrowing - I could understand people's helplessness. But we were the wrong target."
A civil rebellion
Thomas Mayo knows what it means to lose an argument to the tactics of fear-mongering, misinformation, and a conversation that struggles to be heard in a zone "flooded with shit". He watched it happen from the inside.
The former wharfie from Darwin turned unionist, author, and signatory to the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart was one of the leading advocates for establishing a Voice to Parliament - a campaign that would ultimately fail at referendum despite polls indicating a majority support for its sentiment, as voters were left drowning in the static and noise.
"If you don't know, vote 'no'," the Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, infamously declared during the 2023 campaign leading to the Voice to Parliament referendum. It was an excellent soundbite. It was also an appeal to vote in ignorance.
"That is what he was saying," Clare Wright, the professor of history at La Trobe University, who will also attend this year's festival, says. "That it is fine to be ignorant; it's fine to not have an understanding of the issue. He didn't say if you don't know, go and find out."
The referendum that would have enshrined a parliamentary advisory body of First Nations people in the Constitution - arguably one end of a long thread that connected the Bark Petitions, and innumerable events before, after and in between, to the present - was defeated in considerable part because voters said they were left confused in the torrent of noise.
"There is a lot of information, but you had to listen - you had to do a bit of work," Professor Wright says. "You were going to have to find out things."
Mayo, who will appear in a festival conversation on Saturday, still believes most of the country wants to see it done. He believes it is the right thing to do.
The Voice referendum was lost, he says, because, when push came to shove, people were under immense pressure to do the right thing in an unsettled sea of shouted contradictory opinions about what the right thing is and is not, fuelled by a cynical underlying sentiment that to doubt is to lose and to lose is to be a loser.
"We have to be conscious that people are under a lot of pressure," he says. "And that's not just the cost of living and the run-of-the-mill stuff of life. People carry prejudices. We all do, whether you are conscious of those or not.
"With all those things combined, it is really difficult for people to know what's the right thing to do."
"It's the reason I'm a writer ... I want to reach across that divide. There is a solitary component to writing, but it is a very collaborative process as well. It would be great if more people read books.
"Reading is a way to help people understand other people's perspectives and that is such an important thing."
"Everything is political. And politics is hard because it can feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall. But it does make a difference. Unless people engage in politics in that formal way, we're not going to get anywhere."
A few educated women
When the Yolgnu people of the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory sent the first Yirrkala Bark Petition to Canberra in August 1963, the federal minister then responsible for the territories quickly dismissed the documents as unrepresentative.
The Yolgnu were protesting the federal government's approval of bauxite mining leases that removed more than 36,000 hectares of land once preserved for hunting and use by the Yirrkala clans.
The petition was etched on bark and signed by nine men and three women who spoke for the 500 residents of the land being stripped from the reserve by a deal that had been kept secret from them.
When the minister, Paul Hasluck, said the cry did not speak for all the Yirrkala clans, the Yolgnu returned with another petition, this time signed by 31 people and inked by their thumbprints.
Professor Wright has made an extensive study of the petitions and other founding materials of Australian democracy in her trilogy of books, taking in the Eureka flag and the women's suffrage banner that hangs in Parliament House. She will bring her third book in the series, which unpacks the events surrounding the Yirrkala petitions that ultimately fuelled the land rights movement, to the Newcastle Writers Festival this year.
"Hasluck's response so closely mirrors the response of, say, women who were signing petitions in the 1880s and saying they wanted the vote," Professor Wright says.
"Conservatives, anti-suffragists, people advocating for the status quo and men who didn't want to give up their power kept saying this isn't the wish of all women. This is just the wish of a few educated women - blue stockings, they called them."
"There have always been ways of vilifying, demonising, gaslighting and trivialising those who speak up against the prevailing power dynamics. What they end up doing is claiming that they are the standard - the voice of common sense ... and it is all those other noisy groups who are the ones who have identity politics, who are the ones being 'woke' or whatever the contemporary term is that's being used to invalidate the critique."
A history in soundbites
In an increasingly polarised world, where the grey areas of the social and political map are blotched in darker ink thrown from the edges - where the cultural currency of the day is not economic but social, and cynicism permeates the conversation - Rosemarie Milsom calls the steady civility of the writers festival radical in its refusal to be caught in the spin.
"We held firm," she says. "And in the end, nothing happened. And this is what I'm seeing. I think arts organisations become overwhelmed when they are caught in the spotlight by these political tensions. It's intimidating when you're being bombarded ... you just get bombarded relentlessly all day."
"I think people's helplessness and anger and frustration gets channelled into what is nearest and easiest to reach ... working in the arts at the moment is incredibly contentious."
"But it was a matter of looking at our values - the principles of why we do what we do, and being prepared to defend that."
"On principle, you don't have a writers festival to have these huge, fiery debates and drive division. No one wants to do that ... civility is really important, and it is becoming more so."
Professor Wright does not believe that there is anything that is timeless - nothing is universal - but there are patterns. History does not repeat, but it rhymes.
"When certain sacred cows are pushed back against," she says. "You get that argument that there is something that is sacred, profound and natural - a natural way of things. But when you look at the mechanism behind it, often there is nothing natural about it.
"Those narratives - those myths - are often very well funded."
The modern myth of the internet is built on the way that connectivity democratised the public square. The public conversation has never been so inclusive, so populated with diverse voices, and information has never been so free, but, as Professor Wright argues, it exists in soundbites.
"It's impersonal," she says. "You can be in your lounge room, firing off your soundbites."
"I think that that's a different thing from spaces like writers festivals where there can be a contest of ideas that's held under a particular set of conventions that are about listening and learning. And there has to be a place for that."
The name for the Yirrkala Bark Petitions was Naku Dharuk. It became the title of Professor Wright's book.
"It made me realise they weren't petitions at all - that was just the English word that was put to the form. What Yolgnu people were doing involved an enormous amount of collective decision-making that included men and women and representatives of different clans, and those systems of governance did not happen in soundbites. They could take hours, weeks, and months. The idea that anything could be cut short is anathema to that style of decision-making."
The Newcastle Writers Festival opened on Friday, April 4 and runs through Sunday, April 6. The program is available online.
