Opinion: Brisbane Writers Festival fracas not the first

THE ruckus over Germaine Greer and Bob Carr’s being “disinvited” is only the latest in a line of scandals to plague the Brisbane Writers Festival, writes Susan Johnson.

ANYONE remember Germaine Greer’s opening night address to the 2012 Brisbane Writers Festival when she declared almost half of all Queenslanders were functionally illiterate?

She claimed that “the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports 47 per cent of Queenslanders cannot read a newspaper, follow a recipe, make sense of timetables or understand instructions on a medicine bottle”.

Jane Cowell, then director of the State Library of Queensland’s public and indigenous library services, rushed in to argue that Greer had misquoted the data, which measured varying degrees of literacy across different levels, and that Greer had drawn wrong conclusions.

Then, at the 2016 Brisbane Writers Festival, there was the scandal about American author Lionel Shriver (We Need To Talk About Kevin). Shriver argued that novelists have the right to imagine characters of any cultural or ethnic background, without worrying about whether the “cultural police” will accuse them of “cultural appropriation”. Her decision to wear a sombrero to illustrate her point only added to the controversy.

Now we’ve got a fresh writerly ruckus, over the Brisbane Writers Festival inviting Germaine Greer, ex-NSW premier Bob Carr and journalist Marian Wilkinson to next month’s festival, and then withdrawing the invitation.

Greer and Carr’s publisher, Melbourne University Press, immediately organised a rival author event, calling it “Uncensored: Greer and Carr”. Another author, former foreign minister Gareth Evans, has threatened to withdraw from this year’s festival unless BWF management can give him good reasons why he shouldn’t.

He said the ban on Carr and Greer was utterly unworthy of any literary festival that wanted to be taken seriously, and called it fundamentally a “freedom of speech” issue.

Greer is famous for getting up people’s noses. As such, she comes from a long line of wayward, maverick writers who never know when to stop or – if they do – they invariably stop at a place no-one else wants to go.

Writers drink too much, harbour grudges, are frequently silly and occasionally unbelievably courageous. Flaubert went to trial in order to write something beautiful and true; and George Orwell took himself off to fight in the Spanish Civil War.

According to Orwell’s essay Why I Write, writers write because there is some lie they wish to expose and some fact to which they want to draw attention.

The American screenwriter Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) put it more bluntly: “The writer’s role is to menace to public’s conscience.”

In Greer’s case, that’s both within and without the context of a writer’s festival.So, at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival – sans Greer – let’s hope the opening address by QC Geoffrey Robertson gives the audience something to argue about or that Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) again makes us ponder the meaning of freedom of speech.

As the old cliche goes: it makes you think, which is surely the point.

Brisbane Writers Festival, September 6-9