It started off well enough, as all well-intentioned stories do. The Bendigo Writers’ Festival’s marketing for their August event had gushingly told potential attendees all throughout 2025 that this year would be a festival for ‘readers, writers and creative thinkers’ (except for people thinking creatively about genocide, however we digress) and more importantly that, “this August, the story continues.”

If you’d read that on all the posters and street flags and social media posts and media interviews the City Of Greater Bendigo (the legal owners of the BWF) spread about the place during 2025, a reasonable person would conclude this year’s festival would be a continuation of the previous festivals. More of the same. A continuing story. The story of the growing regional-writers’-festival-that-could, would be getting another chapter, just like the previous chapters every year, over the past thirteen years since 2012. Yes, this year – the story continues.

Except it didn’t. This year’s Bendigo Writers’ Festival descended into a farce of last minute emails, and speakers and presenters refusing to attend, and hundreds of customers demanding their money back, and angry letters, and opening night’s being cancelled, and the city of Bendigo missing out on potentially millions in dollars for the local economy.

For reasons we can presume amounted to a combination of last minute cowardice, gross incompetence and a failure to understand the laws of the Streisand Effect, the BWF organisers this year decided not to continue the story – they decided to blow it all up in their face.

So, given the festival has happily existed in Bendigo every August since 2012, and given that it appears to have operated reasonably free of major controversy, what exactly happened to change things this year?

Why did speakers and presenters receive a demand at the last minute to alter their contractual terms and conditions without their express input? The Shot has viewed the contracts the City of Greater Bendigo entered into with BWF speakers and presenters. The contracts say nothing about complying with an enforced Code Of Conduct, nor that the said Code Of Conduct would be thrust upon participants at the last minute, nor does the BWF contract supply any indication of the wording of potential Code of Conduct conditions.

Not only that, but in the many months over the past year when speakers and presenters were busily entering into agreements to attend the BWF, it appears none of them were warned that part of their agreement to speak included the fact they would be expected to, at the last minute, abide by terms from an unknown third party that demanded they agree to a highly contested definition of antisemitism that includes any ideological critique of Israel.

Apart from an inability to handle acrimonious letters from mysterious antisemitism groups, it appears the BWF organisers and sponsors also missed the concept of informed consent.

Given the unexpected ramifications of this last-minute demand from BWF, it will be interesting to see if any participants choose to investigate legal options open to them. Occasionally, as we have seen in the case of Lattouf v ABC, the only thing that sometimes stops the onslaught of continual, unjustifiable censorship is not the threat of pain, but pain itself. 

The mysterious antisemitism group in question that wrote to the organisers is a small group very impressively titled, the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism. The AAAAA’s also like to call themselves 5A, which may or may not have something to do with either their aversion to alliteration or their fetish for James Bond movies, it’s hard to tell.

It’s important to note at this stage, that AAAAA only established themselves as a registered charity last year and their public records indicate only five directors. Apart from that and a very lovely website, there is no public indication of how many members AAAAA have or who they may be or even what work they’re employed in. Are they all professional academics? Are some of them fishermen? How many of them are there? How many of them are professional writers who attend writers’ festivals? Given the lack of transparency, a cynical person could be forgiven for assuming they might have a hint of astro-turfing about them. Are they in fact, a small collection of people with a very impressive sounding name that don’t actually represent many people at all? 

It’s a pity senior managers at both the Bendigo Writers’ Festival and La Trobe University didn’t question that, or at least spend some time examining the group in question. Instead, in a routine we’ve seen all over Australia over the past two years, management made decisions on the run, driven by panic instead of policy. They quivered in pathetic acquiescence at the sight of the bizarre letter from AAAAA they received in late July, prior to the festival’s launch. The letter was published in full in this excellent analysis by DeepCut News. 

According to the AAAAA-team, the problem was with the festival’s inclusion of Palestinian Australian academic and writer, Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah. In the A-team’s rambling letter, they claim Dr Abdel-Fattah had “marched school children onto the lawns of Sydney University” and demanded they chant slogans, and other hyperbolic nonsense. The nameless letter writers also alleged that Dr Abdel-Fattah is a “known racist” and that she has “dehumanised her fellow academics who do not support her views, stating: ‘I refuse to cite anybody who has remained silent over Gaza,’ “ It’s not clear from the AAAAAs why a woman who refuses to remain silent over the atrocities in Gaza is the one doing the dehumanising and not the Israeli government that is starving children and burning them alive, but such is the warped mindset of the pro-Israel lobby.

It’s also important to note that none of the assertions in said letter are true, and also important to note that the citations within the letter are mostly references to the AAAAA-teams own research and/or citations that lack independent scrutiny. In other words, it’s the world according to them – not the world as it is.

It’s instructive that this four-page exercise in hyperbole was sent exclusively to the Vice Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University. This is the usual tactic we see within the pro-Israel lobby. (One only has to see how easily Ita Buttrose and co, relented after just a few emails). Attack the weakest, easy to collapse links, threatening much and representing very little.

The Shot is also aware from several festival speakers and presenters that a senior organiser of the festival was aware early in the week of the festival’s launch, of the actions both La Trobe and BWF intended to take and warned both organisations of the ensuing fall-out that would eventuate from such a rash decision. The fact that this and other warnings from other experienced literary presenters were not heeded, the fact that the magnitude of fall-out from their decision would be worse than any vague hysteria from a group with no members, speaks to the very serious dilemma now facing Australia’s cultural and learning institutions.

Australia as a nation has learned from this by now – why haven’t the keepers of our institutions learned as well? These small-scale, behind the scenes threats and boogie-man tactics have been going on now for almost two years, and still managers and administrators have not learned that there is nothing behind the smokescreen. But there is very real blowback in the real world from their ill-considered decisions.

As we look back at Antoinette Lattouf and the ABC, at Jayson Gillham and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, at Khaled Sabsabi and Creative Australia, and now, the Bendigo Writers’ Festival and whatever damage they will inevitably suffer, we can all see that the ensuing controversy results in even worse outcomes for the managers, boards and organisers than if they’d simply politely ignored the empty, vacuous threats in the first place.

The pro-Israel lobby in Australia do not have the power – they have bluff. The pro-Israel lobby in Australia does not have the numbers – they have puffery. They’re a farce, a smokescreen, a collection of paranoids intent on defending a foreign power’s despicable actions at the expense of Australia’s own social democracy. What they do have, however, is a ready supply of cowardly politicians, managers and administrators who have repeatedly failed to read the mood of the Australian public and who continue to further sink their respective projects and causes into an oblivion where democracy belongs to secret letter writers and wealthy donors, who will do whatever it takes to defend a foreign genocidal nation.

It may not be what the city of Bendigo aspires to – and it certainly isn’t the type of Australia we aspire to either. 

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Note: The Shot asked the City Of Greater Bendigo for a response to the following question. We asked their media team this four times over two days:

“Could you please advise whether any councillors or staff, or both, of the City of Greater Bendigo will be attending the 2025 Australian Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism on the Gold Coast Sept 3-5 2025?”

The City Of Greater Bendigo refused to respond to the question of whether any of their councillors and/or staff would be attending the all-expenses-paid Australian Mayor’s Summit Against Antisemitism on the Gold Coast next month.

We leave you to draw your own conclusions.