Brave spaces, but not safe ones: what Louise Adler did next

Louise Adler is in familiar surrounds. She is at a table near the back of Tonka — where she became so besotted with the house dal that she cajoled chef Adam D’Sylva to hand over the recipe (she likens her homemade result to a lumpy concrete mix) — and in the middle of a flaming row about books, ideas and politics.

On the day of our lunch, the row hasn’t started in earnest, but we both know it is a matter of when. A constant in Adler’s working life across magazines, newspapers, books and now, as director of the Adelaide Writers’ Week, is her capacity to provoke. This time, she has made a certainty of it by setting aside a full day’s program for leading Palestinian authors, poets and essayists to discuss their experiences of occupation and dispossession.

Louise Adler: “If writers’ festivals ... cannot with care and considered approach engage with complex and contentious issues, then we have a problem in civil society.”Credit: Eddie Jim

In the time it takes the Tonka kitchen to smoke one of their ocean trouts in the tandoor, a freshly baked cultural outrage will burst onto the front page of The Australian, with Adler accused by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Anti-Defamation League of an egregious double whammy: platforming a Putin apologist and antisemitic vitriol. This is followed by Zionist Federation of Australia president Jeremy Leibler, who contends that including a “disproportionate number of writers who are Palestinians or activists for the Palestinian cause” at a literary festival inevitably promotes hatred of Jews.

The two writers in the crosshairs of the Zionist lobby are Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American activist and novelist who has described Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as “a depraved Zionist”, and poet Mohammed El-Kurd, who has likened Israelis to Nazis.

South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, having previously provided his face and endorsement to the writers’ week program, now questions why either writer was included. A corporate partner of the Adelaide Festival which houses the writers’ week, law firm Minter Ellison, has withdrawn its support in protest.

Before any of this, Adler says what she will repeat many times in the days to come: that she is interested in creating brave spaces, not safe spaces. “If writers’ festivals, like universities and the media, cannot with care and considered approach engage with complex and contentious issues, then we have a problem in civil society.”

She also holds to the quaint notion that the worth of any writer is measured by more than the sum of their most outrageous tweet. It is a view at odds with a prevailing culture, which is swift to condemn and relatively slow to read.

Mohammed El-Kurd and Susan Abulhawa are on the program at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week.Credit: Instagram/T Sauppe

Adler has been around this block before, most notably when, in her previous role with Monash University Publishing, she commissioned John Lyons, a respected foreign correspondent and investigative journalist with Fairfax, News Corp and the ABC, to write Dateline Jerusalem, a short, pugnacious volume which chronicled the pressure applied to him and his editors to adopt a pro-Israel narrative of the Middle East.

Adler says Australian media outlets have “pre-emptively buckled” to a relentless Zionist lobby and argues that the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lead a hardline, right-wing coalition makes it incumbent on any major literary festival to explore the Palestinian perspective.

“It’s a terrible, tragic impasse,” she says. “How is this going to change? How are Israelis going to live in a peaceful society? And how are the Palestinians going to be freed from occupation and allowed self-determination? I thought to spotlight the writing, the flourishing literary community of poets, essayists and novelists coming out of Palestine was an important focus. And if I was making a writers’ festival in Melbourne, I would be doing the same thing.”

To the surprise of no one who has worked for or with Adler over her 40-year career as a publisher and editor, she is staunchly backing the authors she invited to Adelaide. Her loyalty to writers and their ideas has cost her friendships and contributed to her departure from Melbourne University Press, when her decision to publish ABC journalist Louise Milligan’s book detailing unproven child sex allegations against George Pell put her at odds with the then chancellor of the university, Allan Myers, a friend and supporter of the late cardinal.

Adler’s resignation from MUP after 17 years is a complex and contested story which, as we wait for our butter chicken to arrive, she shows little appetite to revisit. “I do think the caravan has moved on,” she says.

Yet clearly the episode still rankles. Adler has read the publishing house’s newly released MUP: A Centenary History, and is both annoyed and disappointed that neither she nor Glyn Davis, the former vice chancellor who supported her for many years in the role, was contacted by the author for comment. “It is incumbent on the author to give the subject the right of reply,” she says. “Not to do that feels like a real authorial judgment and publishing misjudgment.”

The author of the centenary history, Stuart Kells, says he did not approach Adler or anyone else involved in the dispute for comment so that he could maintain neutrality in how he recorded the episode. “As an author, I found plenty of material in the archives and on the public record,” he says. “There is, of course, a personal side to it as well – a lived experience that Louise and others had – but much of that is for a different book. My focus was on the factual events, put in the context of a century of similar episodes and disputes.”

Adler’s decision to quit MUP, along with five other company directors including former foreign minister Bob Carr and former human rights commissioner Gillian Triggs, coincided with the university’s decision, led by Myers and Duncan Maskell, the vice chancellor Myers poached from Cambridge, to shift the priorities of the publishing house away from commercial titles and towards more scholarly works. The changes at MUP are summed up by the strap line which appears on the publisher’s website. Instead of the Adler-era “Books with spine”, MUP now promises “Books from Australia’s oldest university press”.

Pani puri filled with spiced potato, chickpeas, tamarind chutney and aromatic water. Credit: Eddie Jim

After leaving MUP at the start of 2019, Adler continued to commission books for the next three years as publisher-at-large with Hachette Australia and as professorial fellow at Monash University Publishing. She suspects she has now published her last book, but says her job with Adelaide Writers’ Week continues the thing she liked most about publishing: matching authors and ideas. “It is so nice. I don’t have to worry about the advance, I don’t have to watch the sales skyrocket or not skyrocket, I don’t have to worry about the returns or, as we call it in the trade, distressed stock. It is very freeing. It is ‘invite the world and hope they say yes’.”

Her involvement with Adelaide Writers’ Week closes a circle. When Adler was in her final year of high school at Mount Scopus Memorial College, her mother, Ruth, pulled her out of class for two weeks to go to Adelaide for the festival. It was a radical thing for her mum to do, Adler reflects, given the priority the former English teacher placed on education, and it had a radical impact.

She still remembers the thrill of listening to poet Allen Ginsberg recite Howl, his ode to the Beat movement, at the Adelaide Town Hall, and bumping into one of her heroes, Mikis Theodorakis, a Greek resistance fighter, composer, lyricist and future government minister then living in exile from a right-wing junta that had banned his music. “It was dazzling,” she says.

Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (centre) at Sydney Airport in 1972, the year he appeared at the Adelaide Festival.Credit: Golding

It was also an early lesson about the brickbats that greet subversive views. Ginsberg’s publisher was prosecuted for obscenity, albeit unsuccessfully, at the height of McCarthyism and Theodorakis was jailed and beaten by Italian and German fascists before being forced into exile. A teenage Adler, during a regular Saturday night performance of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, was whacked on the head with a handbag by a woman sitting behind her when she refused to stand for the then national anthem, God Save the Queen.

Adler is hardly a rabble-rouser these days, having published the memoirs of former prime minister Tony Abbott and a generation of prominent Labor and Liberal figures. She is effusive in her support for the Albanese government’s freshly announced national cultural policy, which includes nearly $20 million for Writers Australia, a proposed new body to support Australian authors.

Over the summer, she called on a favour from Glyn Davis, on a break from his day job as Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to fly to London to interview playwright Tom Stoppard and his biographer, Dame Hermione Lee. The results will be shown in Adelaide, along with a live conversation between Davis and Stoppard, to open the writers’ week.

Mangalorean-style pipis with white dhokla, a savoury sponge.Credit: Eddie Jim

In a rare concession, Adler withdraws from what’s left of the shared plates to give me a free run at the last of the paneer tikka. After two hours of spice-filled dishes and spicier conversation, neither of us are in a rush to leave.

I ask her, having paired so many ideas with so many authors over the years, for the best idea that remained an orphan. She replies that it is study of reputation: how quickly it can be stripped from someone and people’s capacity to regain it. She says she has been mesmerised by the subject ever since she saw a shirtless Ben Cousins, with “Such is Life” tattooed across his chest, being arrested by West Australian police on the streets of Northbridge in 2007.

“In Australia, you can be destroyed but you can be rehabilitated,” she muses. “How does that happen?”

That’s an idea for another lunch.

Adelaide Writers’ Week runs from Saturday, March 4 to Thursday, March 9.

Chip Le Grand is the author of two books commissioned by Louise Adler: The Straight Dope, published by MUP; and Lockdown, published by Monash University Publishing, and will be appearing at the Adelaide Writers’ Week. Nine Entertainment, publisher of The Age, is a major partner of the Adelaide Writers’ Week.