‘Ideally, you’d know nothing about the game’: festival censorship and the short memory of arts reporting

Sports commentators proudly know their history. Arts journalists not so much.

AFL commentary is peppered with relevant examples of past scores, rule-changes, umpire decisions, administrators. Such relevant cases can date several decades and serve to enlighten the viewer of the dynamics of the match of the day.

Gideon Haigh, in his recent articleseamlessly links the retirement of Australian Test cricketer, Usman Khawaja, with the lineage of those who played decades before him whilst also providing a pertinent class analysis.

Compare this depth with the reporting of the controversy of the cancellation of scheduled writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah at the 2026 Adelaide Writers Week.

To recap briefly, Dr Abdel-Fattah was uninvited. Writers and sponsors withdrew in solidarity. The event was cancelled. Louise Adler, the director of Writers Week resignedbecause the Adelaide Festival Board did not heed her experienced advice.

The coverage of the scandal was extensive but showed little understanding of the long history of censorship at the Adelaide Festival.

Journalists noted the sensitivities linked to the recent tragedy at Bondi, but then largely confined their discussion to an analytical window of just two years.

Dennis Muller in his commentary on thefiasco makes comparisons with the Ukrainian writers who withdrew from the Writers Festival in 2023, the exit of writers from the 2025 Bendigo Writers festival and Creative Australia's hatchet handling of Australian representation at the 2026 Venice Biennale. ABC News made the same observations.

Claire Lehmann, for The Australian, at least briefly nodded at history in noting that the Festival's Writers Week was founded in 1960.

But this is not the first time that the Adelaide Festival has suffered a bloody nose in an attempt to avoid controversy. In their coverage of the 2026 Adelaide Writers Week, arts reporters overlooked that fact that Festival censorship history had indeed repeated itself.

Katherine Towers in her 2001 article for the Financial Reviewprovides a well-informed, chronological overview of Adelaide Festival crises, a perspective lacking in the reporting of the calamity of Adelaide Writers Week 2026. David Marr is a journalist and political commentator but his historical insight is limited to the publication Adelaide Festival 60 Years. Here, Marr notes that the Governors of the 1960 Adelaide Festival rejected Alan Seymour's play One Day of the Year because if was deemed offensive to veterans and the middle class.

These Festival Governors also rejected Patrick White's drama The Ham Funeral for inclusion in the programme because the script referred to abortion. Such was the Governors' decision, despite the play'ssuccessful season in London and the firm recommendation of Geoffrey Dutton, chair of the Festival's Drama Committee. In 1964, the Festival also rejected Patrick White's then new play Night on Bald Mountain.