It began as a quiet programming dispute in the genteel city of churches.<\/p>\n
But by Wednesday morning, a frantic, six-day war of words had culminated in the end of the 2026 Adelaide writers\u2019 week and total institutional collapse.<\/p>\n
What started with the discreet exit of a business titan and arts board veteran spiralled into boardroom carnage last weekend, with mass resignations, lawyers\u2019 letters of demands and allegations of racism and hypocrisy flung by all sides.<\/p>\n
By the time the writers\u2019 week director, Louise Adler, walked<\/a>, the boycott of writers, commentators and academics had gone global and the state\u2019s premier cultural event had become a hollowed-out shell.<\/p>\n The cancellation of AWW may only be the opening act. The wreckage has now cleared the way for a supreme court showdown between the state\u2019s telegenic \u2013 and until now, Teflon \u2013 premier, Peter Malinauskas, and the polemic Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah \u2013 the writer at the heart of the row, whose invitation to the 2026 event was withdrawn<\/a> less than two weeks ago.<\/p>\n At the centre of the looming legal battle is the premier\u2019s now-notorious Bondi analogy that even Malinauskas\u2019s allies admit may have finally scratched his protective coating.<\/p>\n \u2018Spewing anti-Zionism\u2019<\/p>\n The seeds of this spectacular collapse were sown not in the heat of January but in the spring thaw of last October, with the resignation of Tony Berg, a former managing director of Macquarie Bank and Boral, and a key festival benefactor. The resignation may have been discreet but the letter sent to the festival\u2019s board<\/a> and the South Australian government on 22 October was a snapshot of a board in its last throes, allegedly held hostage by an unyielding artistic director.<\/p>\n Berg, a self-described Zionist and a governor of the Israel Australia Chamber of Commerce, accused the festival\u2019s leadership of presiding over a \u201cblatantly one-sided\u201d mission that had traded open debate for a \u201cvendetta against Israel and Zionism\u201d.<\/p>\n He alleged that Adler had resolutely failed to provide balance in her programming since her appointment in 2022, and of \u201cspewing anti-Zionism\u201d through her choice of speakers. Abdel-Fattah came to national attention with an Instagram post declaring \u201cZionists have no claim or right to cultural safety\u201d shortly after the conflict broke out in Gaza. For Berg, her inclusion in the 2026 lineup was the final \u201ctravesty\u201d \u2013 a move he claimed crossed the line from political criticism into the territory of antisemitism.<\/p>\n South Australia\u2019s premier Peter Malinauskas. Photograph: Mike Bowers\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Watching the fallout from the other side of the world this week, Berg doubled down on his position.<\/p>\n On Sunday Guardian Australia reported on a leaked letter<\/a> from the board saying a Jewish New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, had been cancelled from the 2024 program due to scheduling issues. On Tuesday Berg issued a statement<\/a> accusing both Adler and Abdel-Fattah of displaying a \u201cselective\u201d and \u201cutterly hypocritical\u201d approach to free speech, alleging that it was Adler and Abdel-Fattah who had led the charge to de-platform Friedman, who had written a controversial column comparing the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.<\/p>\n Sign up: AU Breaking News email<\/a><\/p>\n According to Berg, Adler and the festival\u2019s top leadership had issued a comply-or-resign ultimatum to the board to force Friedman\u2019s withdrawal, an irony Berg noted was seemingly lost on the authors boycotting the festival.<\/p>\n Adler reacted by attacking Berg\u2019s integrity as a board member but has neither confirmed nor denied she issued an ultimatum.<\/p>\n Abdel-Fattah disputes the allegation that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman, but does not deny she was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour \u201cwho wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWe write letters on Google Docs to boards,\u201d she said. \u201cThe people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.\u201d<\/p>\n Since last Thursday Malinauskas has been steadfast in his denials of any direct interference<\/a>, insisting that the board had acted independently. He pointed to his own defence of the festival in 2023 \u2013 when he resisted calls to pull funding for the event over a different set of Palestinian writers \u2013 as proof of his longstanding commitment to artistic autonomy.<\/p>\n But he has admitted that he began to lobby for Abdel-Fattah\u2019s removal from the writers\u2019 week around Christmas, when he had \u201ca number\u201d of conversations with the board chair, leading to him penning a letter to the board on 2 January, \u201cadvocating\u201d his point of view.<\/p>\n According to political observers on the ground in North Terrace, the fingerprints of political interference are difficult to ignore. By the time the board took action the premier\u2019s office had effectively seeded local press with enough \u201csecurity and harmony\u201d concerns to ensure the author\u2019s removal was viewed as an act of public safety, rather than a political hit.<\/p>\n \u2018Despicable\u2019<\/p>\n During the collective national grief over the Bondi terrorist attack, the festival\u2019s board and the SA government quietly conducted a cultural safety audit. In between Christmas and new year festivities, it reached its terminal conclusion.<\/p>\n The board chose to ignore concerns raised by Adler during these deliberations \u2013 but she was not the only one. With the Venice Biennale<\/a> and Bendigo writers\u2019 festival<\/a> debacles still fresh in public memory, the festival\u2019s executive director, Julian Hobba, warned the board during multiple meetings of the inevitable fallout from any move to dump a writer on the grounds of their strident political views.<\/p>\n Nevertheless on the morning of 8 January the board allowed the first domino to fall.<\/p>\n Abdel-Fattah\u2019s response to her cancellation was swift, framing the decision not as an act of community harmony but one of \u201cblatant and shameless\u201d anti-Palestinian racism and censorship. The board\u2019s attempt to associate her with the Bondi massacre was \u201cdespicable\u201d, she said.<\/p>\n The influential progressive thinktank the Australia Institute fired the next salvo, abruptly withdrawing its partnership and sponsorship.<\/p>\n Crowds at an Adelaide writers\u2019 week event. Photograph: Andrew Beveridge<\/p>\n What followed was a global literary mutiny. By the time the headline act \u2013 the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern \u2013 confirmed she was pulling out<\/a> on Monday, more than 70 literary luminaries had already turned the Pioneer Women\u2019s Memorial Garden into a contagion site, announcing their boycott of the 2026 event on social media or via their agents. The British novelist Zadie Smith, the Pulitzer prize winner Percival Everett, the Greek economist and firebrand Yanis Varoufakis and the Russian-American journalist M Gessen, along with the local star attractions Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko and Michelle de Kretser, were among them.<\/p>\n At least as many participants again had quietly informed either AWW or Adelaide festival management they were pulling out \u2013 and behind the scenes, festival organisers were begging the legendary British band Pulp and their uncompromising frontman, Jarvis Cocker, not to formally cancel their contract<\/a> to play at the festival\u2019s free opening night concert on 27 February at Elder Park.<\/p>\n The premier\u2019s carefully curated message of social cohesion was being lost in the static of an international outcry.<\/p>\n And Adler retreated to the tranquility of her home, tuning out the persistent thrum of media inquiries and quietly drafting her resignation manifesto.<\/p>\n Open letter<\/p>\n On Saturday morning the board met to discuss crisis management. It was \u201cnot enjoyable\u201d, according to the wry understatement of one person present.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not over by a long shot,\u201d said another.<\/p>\n Before them was an open letter<\/a> from the elder statesman of the SA arts scene, Rob Brookman, a former executive director and artistic director of the Adelaide festival. Demanding the immediate reinstatement of Abdel-Fattah, it was signed by luminaries of festivals past, including the former artistic directors Neil Armfield, Peter Sellars, Jim Sharman and Anthony Steel. By Monday that list of signatures would grow to 17, including Stephen Page and Robyn Archer.<\/p>\n By the meeting\u2019s end, the exodus had begun. Nicholas Linke, a senior partner at the major law firm Dentons, and the board\u2019s primary legal expertise, was the first to walk. Then departed Donny Walford, the founding director of the leadership and coaching company Behind Closed Doors, and Daniela Ritorto, a former BBC journalist and wife to federal health minister Mark Butler.<\/p>\n Its chair, Tracey Whiting, switched the lights off with her own resignation at the meeting\u2019s end.<\/p>\n On Sunday, unaware the board was now inquorate, Abdel-Fattah\u2019s legal team at Marque Lawyers sent it a letter<\/a>. It was a formal challenge to the \u201ccultural sensitivity\u201d grounds used to dump her, demanding her immediate reinstatement and an apology for the \u201cmalicious\u201d characterisation of her views as a threat to community safety.<\/p>\n With no board left to govern and a list of boycotting authors that had swelled past 170, Adler announced her own resignation<\/a> in Guardian Australia on Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n \u201cI cannot be party to silencing writers,\u201d she wrote<\/a>, describing the board\u2019s capitulation as a \u201cterminal betrayal\u201d of the festival\u2019s mandate. She noted that the pressure to self-censor had made her position \u201cutterly untenable\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m fed up with the vicious bullying and lies about me,\u2019 Abdel-Fattah says. Photograph: Flavio Brancaleone\/AAP<\/p>\n By the end of the day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation had pulled the plug. The 2026 writers\u2019 week was over before it began. A new skeleton board was announced, somewhat ironically including one of the board\u2019s fiercest critics \u2013 Brookman, who had initiated the directors\u2019 petition.<\/p>\n The Bondi analogy<\/p>\n Standing amid the wreckage on Tuesday, the premier emerged to deliver the now-notorious \u201cBondi analogy\u201d.<\/p>\n Seeking to justify the exclusion of Abdel-Fattah, Malinauskas asked the media pack: \u201cCan you imagine if a far-right Zionist walked into a Sydney mosque and murdered 15 people? Can you imagine that as the premier of this state, I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to writers\u2019 week and speaking hateful rhetoric towards Islamic people? Of course I wouldn\u2019t, but the reverse has happened in this instance.\u201d<\/p>\n By Wednesday morning, as the festival corporation emailing patrons promising refunds for the few ticketed events AWW has each year, another letter from Marque was fired off.<\/p>\n Signed by the firm\u2019s managing partner, Michael Bradley \u2013 who is also representing the pianist Jayson Gillham<\/a> in his discrimination case against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra \u2013 it was a show cause notice to the premier himself<\/a> over alleged defamation.<\/p>\n On Instagram, Abdel-Fattah accused Malinauskas of going even further than previous statements supporting her removal from the festival by linking her to the Bondi atrocity and suggesting, by way of analogy, that she was \u201can extremist terrorist sympathiser\u201d.<\/p>\n The new board met twice the day after it was formed. Led by Judy Potter, a veteran arts administrator and go-to institutional fixer for the SA government, it voted to publicly apologise to Abdel-Fattah<\/a> and promise her a gig at next year\u2019s AWW.<\/p>\n As for this year\u2019s event, members deemed it \u201ctragically irretrievable\u201d.<\/p>\n The academic in the eye of the storm accepted the apology wholeheartedly. But Abdel-Fattah isn\u2019t finished with the premier.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is an extraordinary imbalance and abuse of power here,\u201d she said, adding: \u201cI\u2019m fed up with the vicious bullying and lies about me.\u201d<\/p>\n When asked if he had gone too far with his Bondi remarks, the premier remained unrepentant: \u201cMy only motivation has come from a place of a desire for people to treat each other civilly with compassion, in the interest of humanity more broadly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n