Audience swallows tripe

Earlier this year, when the Sydney Writer’s Festival program was released, I made my usual complaint about the exorbitant price of the tickets. It isn’t worth paying that much, I argued—upwards of forty dollars for some sessions—when the festival is basically an overlong Radio National segment.

That isn’t an exaggeration. The vast majority of SWF moderators are ABC-affiliated or -adjacent, from David Marr and Annabel Crabb to Waleed Aly and The Bookshelf’s Kate Evans, and a not insignificant number of the sessions are recorded for later broadcast on RN. (I paid more than thirty dollars to watch Aly and Scott Stephens interview Anna Funder for The Minefield, mainly in the hope that one or either of them would call her up on her questionable journalistic ethics, which, naturally, they didn’t.)

I don’t blame the festival too much. It knows who’s keeping the lights on. A Venn diagram of RN listeners and SWF ticket holders—of RN listeners and people who live in Paddington, attend STC matinees, have lunch upstairs at the Museum of Contemporary Art, think the Festival of Dangerous Ideas is edgy, erroneously claim to have always voted Labor—is essentially a single circle. These are the sort of people who will buy a thirteen-dollar croissant at the Carriageworks farmers’ market then head over to the festival to drop even more on talks that, in a couple of weeks, they could hear on the radio for free. (In addition to the sessions that are destined for broadcast, the SWF also winds up releasing great swathes on its podcast. Aside from not costing anything, this level of engagement is a lot more convenient than getting up early on a Sunday morning to brave the cold and cavernous prison that is Carriageworks in order to watch someone field a Zoom call from abroad.) The result is that the festival program—far more than those of the smaller neighbourhood-based festivals, such as the Addi Road Writers’ Festival in Marrickville—tends to be a genteel affair tailored specifically to the tastes of an RN listenership.

The problem is that, under no circumstances whatsoever, should such people and their tastes be allowed to dictate the programming of a literary festival. They are middlebrow, parochial lovers of the mediocre, connoisseurs of the unchallenging and bland. Their favourite kind of literature is YA that doesn’t call itself that. Don’t believe me? They proved as much over the ...