Adelaide Writers’ Week was vibrant, resourced and thriving. So why, returning home with a head full of plans, did Claire Mabey feel unexpectedly sad?
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I watch Conclave on the flight to Adelaide. And Dune, part two. Ralph Fiennes is tense, biblical, even on the small screen dashed with light from the plane window. Conclave would have made a good comedy in some ways: the vaping Cardinal, the weird clash of technology and old school smoke signals and wax seals. The smooth marble cells that have the look of Denis Villeneuve about them. Like the Catholics have been beamed in. Love Denis. The architecture of his science fiction lends an elegance to a genre that can be a cluster of bitsy gadgets. The slow way that the huge Atreides ships drift towards the sand and unfurl without a sound. His other alien movie, Arrival, is my favourite. Dune, part two is too littered with the hallmarks of franchise. But on the plane to Adelaide Writers’ Week it’s the perfect way to pass the time. Debating with myself about whether this is a problematic white saviour story, or an accurate one.
I know it’s going to be warm but not like this. Close, hot air and a bright blue sky. Kitty picks me up. She’s Irish and has been living in Adelaide for a year. She loves it, thinks more people should come here. I think of Christchurch on the drive towards the city. Similar flat plain in the middle, hills round the fringe. Same kind of space between roads: wide. But here it’s dry. There hasn’t been rain all year and you can feel it, see it in the brown and in the eucalyptus trees which to me always speak of parched earth with their drooping spears and peeling trunks. Australia scares me with its heat. I have a silent pang for Wellington and the cicadas I’ve left behind. Can’t imagine them crawling out of arid earth, somehow. A pang for my little son, too – he was pissed he couldn’t come with me. Next time, I told him. Next time I’ll take you to the festival.
The hotel is enormous – a soaring terracotta building smack in the middle of the city. It has a pool, and a breakfast buffet with a DIY juicer and I immediately thank myself for coming alone. I’ll wake up on New Zealand time and go for a swim as the sun rises and will see fruit bats flying overhead, haphazard and larger than I expected. I imagine them swooping and biting and sucking blood.
My room isn’t ready yet so I go out walking. Suzanne, the rockstar festival producer who holds the whole thing together, has sent me a map. But I misread it and overshoot the festival site by a few blocks. I walk by a courthouse with looming colonial columns. I have a moment of clarity in its shadow. Adelaide has been landed upon: great concrete shapes settled down upon it. It feels oddly temporary, like you can’t keep the land squashed for too long. A strong, dry wind might blow it all away. Maybe it’s my anxiety about the weather that is more than just weather. I read on The Guardian that is now giving me Aussie news headlines that over 1000 residents don’t have access to water. “Go to the pool to shower,” they’re told.
Adelaide Writers’ Week is famous for being both free and outdoors. I’ve known it for years but at a distance. My life as a festival worker (can’t really bear the term director or programmer or curator because in reality it’s a heap more than that and less glamorous – you’re lugging boxes, tying lanyards to tote bags, printing notes that a writer has forgotten to print, dealing with cancelled flights, eating chips for breakfast, lunch and dinner if you’re lucky) has meant I’ve worked with Adelaide – collaborated with them to share international writers, split costs, make the most of their long-haul travel. I’ve always wanted to go to Adelaide to see it for myself – I prefer outdoor festivals. They feel like proper festivities with the bunting and the breeze and the fluidity of audiences ambling between tents and lining up for coffee and books.
I’m not here strictly as a festival worker. Though that brain is impossible to shut down – if the sound cuts out my heart starts thumping and I try to make eyes with the sound operator; I critique signage; notice every disgruntled huff in the long line for the port-a-loo. I’m here mostly as a writer. I’ve crossed over. And the grass is, I have to admit in the moment, way greener. I note the familiar look of the organisers; adrenaline blazing in their eyes. It’s taken me years to wean myself off that drug. Adrenaline makes you love everyone, boosts your capacities for as long as the trip lasts. Helps you cope. I see the thousand urgent tasks flickering in the front of the organiser’s minds as they greet artists so charmingly: anything we need, they’ll make it happen. I vaguely mention an event I’d love to see and within minutes a ticket is procured and slipped into my bag. So this is what it’s like. I start composing the post-festival thank you email in my head as I go about being a writer. I know exactly what you’re going through. You’ll ride this beast on chardonnay and the arancini balls some thoughtful friend has shoved in front of you. Voltaren, too, if you’ve got bad knees and think you’ll be right with the second-best sneakers. The year of prep will finally be released like fizz from a bottle. You’ll be high on the bubbles. Afterward, you’ll spend a week in low spirits, craving burgers. You’ll forget the painful parts, the polite but to-soon “suggestions” emails, the to-do lists. And you’ll do it all again.
The site, as it turns out, is less than three minutes from my hotel. You walk through a bronze arch – wrinkled like paper. And there I find hundreds of school kids seated, unnaturally quiet, listening to Amie Kaufman and Lili Wilkinson talk about their books. I sit down behind a row of teenage girls who murmur and nod their heads in response to the writers. They’re so into it. Gives me joy – quite pure – to see it. I’m an old-school reader. I believe in books, in how they can aid loneliness, be companions at shit times as well as good ones. The line for book signings is long and noisy – Lili and Amie sign for ages.
Adelaide is only three hours behind but I’m jet lagged. Appetite is shot – my stomach doesn’t know where it is in the day. I nap on the huge bed in my hotel room. Gasp when I open the oddly small doors, like western swinging gates, to the bathroom and find it cavernous, with a bath. I have one. Soak away the 4am start. I read Ali Mau’s autobiography and make notes about it. It’s disturbing. Also satisfying to read it in Australia given Ali’s start in life and enduring relationship with this place.
Dinner is with my Australian publisher, Anna, and writers Amie and Lili who I saw earlier. The food is delicious. We order a lot but each plate is modest, well thought through. I think about water as I eat. We talk about a writer we’ve all met and had to interview who is famously rude. It’s a relief knowing it wasn’t just me. We talk about festivals – how it can be hard for a writers week to exist within a multi-arts festival: they’re different beasts entirely. The writers components can be an afterthought to marketing teams; schools comms, too. Again, I feel relieved it’s not just me.
I have Saturday off and meet up with friends I used to work with overseas. They have a daughter now. She’s delightful and I miss my son and think maybe I should have brought him. He’d love the gardens that we visit to see the Chihuly works exhibited there. Half way through our walk around the sites – in chronological order as instructed by our small friend – we discover that the fine, creature-like installations are not actually made of glass as the marketing says, but a sort of plastic called polyvitro. I’m not so impressed from there on in. When I thought it was glass I’d marvelled – wondered how each delicate piece had been transported. Polyvitro sounds unbreakable, light, dinky and cheap to touch.
My son would love the fringe festival that sprawls over the parklands with chandeliers hanging in the trees and flash mobs and site names like Gluttony. We don’t linger there, though. We drive into town and I buy an 80s jumpsuit at the vintage clothing shop I researched before I arrived. We eat Portuguese custard tarts at the food market and laugh at the signage and enthusiasm for “Sauce Week!”. Kids all lined up learning how to saute tomatoes and add basil. They have little cartons of fresh pasta to eat it with. I think about water again. How does anything grow?
I’m supposed to be going to a drinks event that night but I don’t. I go to bed at my New Zealand bedtime determined to swim at sunrise again. I do. I meet a man in the lift who cannot believe I’m off to the pool at such an hour. He thinks it’ll be cold. I explain I’m from Wellington and he says, “Ah! Makes sense now.”
I’m a little nervous for my events. Nobody knows me in Australia – my book is one in a sea of wonderful middle grade books. But I’m interviewing Lili Wilkinson first – her YA novel Unhallowed Halls is rich with talking points. I watch a couple of sessions on the stage we’ll be on: Dr Matt Agnew talks eloquently about AI – he’s written a book about it intended for younger readers. Smart. They’ll be the ones having to deal with it intruding on their every living moment. I realise I hate AI. I don’t want it to have bodies like the ones I’ve seen on the internet – flinching, twitching humanoid robots with limbs like gladiators. All wrong.
When it comes time for my talk with Lili I’m relaxed. I have lipstick on. The green room has a fridge full of cans of fizz – I drink lemonade to pre-hydrate because I know I’ll sweat on stage. The conversation flows – though we go through my questions faster than I’d anticipated and during the conversation I wonder if my accent is actually hard to understand. Not for Lili who has no trouble responding (she’s famous – much-practised and gives detailed, interesting answers to questions about the hallmarks of the dark academia genre, and writing a character with endometriosis, and a squad who champion gender fluidity). But the audience; I wonder if they’re thinking “god, those squashed vowels of that New Zealand girl”. I think of Bluey and how the New Zealand characters stand out for their hilarious accents – so drippy, like overripe fruit, in contrast to the Aussie ones that are sharper, harder and very clear. I realise later that I’ve already started to mimic it – I hear a distinct twang in my voice that is new but not unwelcome.
Lili signs lots of books – she has hardcore fans. Sweet kids full of questions. This is why we’re here – to connect with these hungry, bright readers. My next session is in the Torrens tent which is programmed all day with children’s writers, starting with picture books and ending with me, talking about The Raven’s Eye Runaways which they say is for ages 10+. That’s probably right though I am funny about age delineations. I worry there will be nobody left. It’s only afterwards I’m told it’s the dreaded last spot.
But there is a crowd – a keen one. I ad lib, go through my slides, talk about te Tiriti and how powerful that document is, how I think about it as a magical piece of paper, that while my book is a fantasy, my real world is entangled with the made-up one. I show them a photo of the hīkoi last year – tell them how protest is part of my book. How when you don’t like the way people are running your world you have to tell them, you have to show them. The kids ask great questions – what the title of the next book is. We laugh about bin chickens and a boy calls them by their proper name – ibis. Much nicer, I agree.
I sign quite a lot of books – I’m pleasantly surprised. The parents are grateful. I’m more grateful to them for bringing their kids to a festival. Next year I’ll bring my son. He’ll chase the bin chickens and the bright-coloured parrots who hold their own conversations in the trees about the writers’ stages.
I say goodbye to Anna who has been my festival mum all weekend; and to Lili and Amie – two generous and hard-working writers. They are running businesses as well as dreaming up adventures. Total pros. I’m impressed and think, not for the first time, we need more interaction between our communities. The Tasman sea isn’t so wide. Only two movies away.
The local society of children’s authors and illustrators whisk me off to the Oval for a drink. There’s about 30 of them – all hyper-welcoming. I’m told a lot of names and retain none of them. But we’ll find each other on Instagram later. A debut author’s dad pulls us outside to sit in the stands for a photo but the sun is so bright and the Oval so expansive I have some kind of vertigo and I imagine my skin blistering like pork.
I leave early to power walk to the town hall to see Simon Schama give a lecture on antisemitism. I buy a bottle of fizzy water at the bar and make my way to the gods (I got a comp ticket) and meet a lovely woman who has come to the festival from Melbourne. Lots of people do, she tells me. We talk about her work – she works with refugees and tells me she went to Auckland recently to visit a refugee who Australia refused to house and so New Zealand took him and his family. I want to talk to her more but the lights go down and the welcome to country starts. I’m used to this being pre-recorded, or very brief. But this time an indigenous man comes to the mic and talks about the language of the land, of the indigenous people, and how it interprets the nature of this place. He talks about how the indigenous knowledge of plants tells whether the summer will be long, if there will be drought. If drought is what the plants indicate then there’s a useful fruit that will end a pregnancy – it’s not safe to have a baby without rain. My new friend leans in and says “That was very special. It’s not usually like this.”
There are two more speeches before Simon. I’m used to this kind of fanfare – have to give the board chair a speaking spot, the premier who’s put so much cash in (bless him). When Schama finally begins he has an active lecture style and the stage manager has to walk up and adjust two microphones – one is for the recording, I assume. She’s a brave woman. Hard to do – interrupt a famous and effusive man while he’s talking. But she’s applauded.
Schama speaks quickly. There are many times I’d like him to pause so I can ask questions, ask him to elaborate, or explain. I realise I am uncomfortable. He takes pains to say he’s not anti-Palestinian. He’s critical of Netanyahu. But there are things not said. I wonder if this would have been better in a conversation format. I flick through the programme booklet and am reminded that this event follows an earlier one on Islamophobia, featuring Waleed Aly. I appreciate the wisdom of this – Louise Adler is a serious, clever programmer. There is a conversation to follow the lecture but I feel my head begin to swim. All the adrenaline of the day, plus it’s nearing midnight at home. I have to leave though I know I should stay and see if any of my questions are asked and answered. If I can leave the town hall feeling less uncomfortable. I’ll watch it on playback I tell myself as I slip out the door and down the stairs.
On the last morning I swim again. Think about Dune and water. How this pool I’m in would be sacred there. Is sacred here. I meet up with the hosts of the ABC podcast The Bookshelf who I’ve only met through the airwaves, studio to studio. They’re lovely – I wish I had more time with them.
On the flight home I watch Dune, part one. So much better than part two. I am unexpectedly sad. Adelaide Writers’ Week was vibrant, resourced, thriving. I’m returning to a thinner ground. Harder arts times. The bitterest part of me thinks the powers that be in New Zealand do not understand the value of arts infrastructure. I should be less tentative – they don’t. Adelaide pours millions in and gets millions back. They believe in it – these communions. I believe in it. I don’t even mind the grey heads – they deserve communion too. Arguably they need it more – without school, without workplaces.
I have a head full of plans by the time we touch down. A children’s festival. A trans-Tasman writers meetup. My flight from Auckland to Wellington is delayed. It’s surprisingly warm at home; eases the transition. I read the volume of Helen Garner’s diaries that I bought at the festival bookshop. When my flight is called, I tuck the book into my bag until Garner’s face is glaring up at me. I remember then how I saw her in the lobby of the hotel back in Adelaide and pretended I didn’t know who she was.
