Germaine Greer can cause controversy simply by being excellent at her profession

Controversy at a writers festival? The Australian’s literary editor, Stephen Romei, July 25:

Outspoken feminist writer Germaine Greer and former NSW premier and foreign minister Bob Carr have been told they are not welcome at the Brisbane Writers Festival because they are “too controversial” and would “overshadow” other writers on the program.

Greer reacted with some surprise, telling Romei:

The Brisbane Writers Festival is very hard work. So, to be uninvited to what is possibly the dreariest literary festival in the world, with zero hospitality and no fun at all, is a great relief.

Caroline Overington joined the literary imbroglio, The Weekend Australian, August 4-5:

(People say writers festivals) are so crushingly dull. The muscular and challenging exchanges of old, if they ever existed, are no longer there.

It’s panel after panel on climate change, or else the evils of Donald Trump … Why is it this way? Well, ask 100 people — I did — and you’ll get 100 reasons, but here are the three main ones: writers festivals are leery of conservatives; they are terrified of controversy; and they are snobs.

And if they don’t fix this, they, like anyone who ­depends on taxpayer tolerance, soon will go out of existence.

Susan Johnson, in The Courier-Mail, demonstrates the value of a good library system, August 1:

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”.

It takes a critic. Peter Craven, in The Australian, July 28:

(MUP chief Louise Adler) should be supported on this issue. What kind of writers festival excludes Carr and Greer?

Germaine Greer’s provocative book On Rape is bound to spark consternation and controversy. Anyone who reads Carr’s fly-on-the-wall diaries will be charmed, whether he’s talking about hobnobbing with Henry Kissinger or patting himself on the back for having watched a BBC version of Cymbeline …

Any writers festival should rush to have him.

As for Greer, Craven can’t see any reason to disinvite her:

Greer is a stirrer with no respect for orthodoxy. She’s also one of the better critics alive.

She’s one of the greatest intellects, one of the finest prose stylists and one of the most powerful personalities this country has produced. Any writers festival that shuns her has forfeited its right to be taken seriously.

The Melbourne Writers Festival will be directed by Marieke Hardy, who was profiled in The Sydney Morning Herald in January 2011:

Anyone who has come across Hardy could tell you that literary drunks are just one of her many enthusiasms …

More unusual is a fervent passion for the veteran political journalist Bob Ellis, whom she has honoured by means of a dog (also called Bob Ellis) and a tattoo … that reads, “And so on, and so it goes.”

Hardy again, September 2011:

It was (Christopher Pyne’s) appearance on … Q&A that really cemented the process causing a nation to, as one, pray for him to get attacked by a large and libidinous dog on his walk home.