I am supposed to be writing about my own engagement with the Bendigo Writers Festival. I feel compelled to write something true, something authentic and personal. I do not want to simply write something general about festivals or how the Bendigo festival fits the general mould or breaks convention. This has resulted in my last few posts being fairly superficial, but this was not out of a reluctance to engage with the festival content, but rather it was the result of wanting to meditate awhile on my understanding of the festival as a whole.
My experience, and indeed enjoyment, of the festival was somewhat marred by financial difficulty. The inevitable delays in accessing funds from the government in the form of basic welfare benefits via Centrelink had me arriving in Bendigo on Thursday morning in a sorry state. I was under-rested, possibly slightly malnourished and unsure of where I would be sleeping that night, though I suspected it would be in my car. Even after obtaining more suitable accommodation, by the end of the second day these stresses had begun to manifest in the form of a headache which affected my ability to sleep that night. My mind has since wandered through association to the story I heard discussed recently on national youth broadcaster Triple J’s current affairs radio programme Hack. The story discussed the same Centrelink delays I am experiencing and reported that these were sometimes cited as a reason for some students feeling they had no choice other than to discontinue their studies. I, however, though still waiting, am determined to apply myself, be patient, and persist with studious endeavour, despite a growing feeling of anger towards the current parliamentary administration and a subsequent feeling of despair about my future.
The festival exists and operates within a fundamentally political space. This space is not confined to the auditoriums and lecture theatres in which the bulk of the content is delivered, but flows out onto the streets. This is especially true in between sessions when patrons walk between venues digesting the informative feast they have just been served. Nor is it necessarily confined to space literal, as one stray comment delivered by a speaker may cause the listener’s imagination to travel through space and indeed time to another location entirely. Also the subject matter of many of the presentations are works of fiction which exist in their own space, spaces that may include strange non-existent kingdoms or rooms in houses never built. I say this space, inclusive of all possible associated spaces, is political because it seems that the political is unavoidable in artistic congregational gatherings. Some sessions I attended were openly political, but even writers primarily creating works with no explicitly political content were asked questions, with each session opening the last five to ten minutes to the audience for this purpose, and these questions often related to issues such as censorship, gender equality and the struggle of the working class to name but a few. Additionally, openly political sessions, of course, had their question times devoted to discussion of the state of local and global politics at present; ‘Why did we get the Brexit result we got?’, ‘Why is there support for Trump?’, ‘Why was there such a narrow victory in our own recent election?’
The headline act for the festival was Julian Assange, one of the biggest names on the global political stage from the last decade. His image was beamed into Bendigo and displayed (in somewhat low resolution) as a huge projection which instantly increased the festival space to include a nondescript room in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Tim Flannery’s passionate speech about global warming transported me, through imagination, to the Agora at La Trobe’s Bundoora campus (I studied there in 2007-08 and again in 2013-14) where one may not pass through the space without being offered, insistently, the opportunity to acquire any number of pamphlets and enter into dialogue demanding political action. Be it an invitation to an organised peaceful protest, or the opportunity to add a name to a growing petition, one of the biggest and most recurrent issues was that of global warming; another I remembered was the close-to-home hitting topic of the federal government’s proposal to deregulate university fees. The latter brought me back to my own studies, which brought me back to the theatre seat I occupied. I also listened to Kerry O’Brien, who was openly critical of Malcolm Turnbull on the matter of policy, and also censured Bill Shorten’s leadership qualities and general sense of purpose and direction. When compared to great leaders of the past he found these two, to his mind, came up short.
This last example highlights a major point I want to make, which is that it seems any space which is inherently political, is also intensely critical. Openly or otherwise, the speakers constantly spoke on subjects that upset or angered them. One of my favourite speakers was Gabrielle Tozer; leaving the talk she contributed to I felt an overwhelming sense of positivity and optimism, which is why I gave her my nomination for my group’s Ayye Plus Award. She offered real advice for aspiring young writers and real support for the idea of following your heart and chasing ‘the dream’ which was backed up with evidence in the form of her own life story. This sanguinity seemed to be in stark contrast to the overwhelming disgruntled nature of the festival’s general programme, and perhaps was due to its inclusion in the Schools Day Program.
To label the festival’s vibe as disgruntled may be unfair, and possibly threatens to undermine the positive impact such festivals have on a local community. I will post a video here soon that I recorded outlining this positive impact. However, I wanted to write genuinely, and to include my own experience of the festival, and while there were many laughs had during my weekend, both in official and unofficial assemblages, and plenty of inspiring snippets suggesting reasons for hope for a brighter future, this idea of being disgruntled actually mirrored my own mindset and seems to be the first thing I feel a desire to discuss.
