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

That same year, Robert Hughes wrote of the Adelaide Festival in Sydney's Daily Mirror:

..[It] is becoming a little too conscious that it is a tourist attraction. It does not want to offend anyone, puzzle anyone, or issue challenges. It is not, therefore, doing its job properly.

Festivals are not meant to play it safe. They are a show of cases for the new.

The fact that Hughes' position is pertinent 62 years later is an embarrassment at best.

The Festival's poor umpiring did not end in 1964.The original poster for the 1998 Adelaide Festival, designed by Festival director Robyn Archer, spiritedly depicted a Byzantine-esque Virgin Mary playing a piano accordion. The Festival Board caved under pressure from some members of the local Greek Orthodox community who were offended. The poster was redesigned.

The fallout from the reversal of the invitation to Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah has damaged the reputation of the whole Adelaide Festival. Legal action against South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas is ongoing.Such are the profoundly hurtful consequences when leaders adhere to the impossible dictum that the arts must not upset anyone.

Could a better understanding by media and other leaders of past arts policies and practices help ensure that regrettable arts-censorship practices of the past are not repeated?

Knowing your history actually helps to make critical analysis more accessible. Again, sports coverage has this. Satirical sports broadcasters Roy Slaven (John Doyle) and H. G. Nelson (Greig Pickhaver) do this routinely.

For example, in September 2011, in their Hour of Power broadcastRoy and HG considered the independent commission established at the time to determine the future of the NRL.

H.G: But coming back to the independent commission though, it has been a very difficult thing to put together, almost an impossible task. Independence is such a tricky word in rugby league, isn't it?

ROY: Well, you want to be arm's length from rugby league, don't you?

HG: Ideally you'd know nothing about the game.

ROY: That's right. …..

HG: The difficulty is that you need people who have almost no contact with the game ...

Roy and HG point out the absurdity of any kind of sports governance or reporting that is not fuelled by relevant knowledge of the game. If arts reporting mirrored sports' popular referencing of its history, then maybe we might see some decent umpiring of the Festival. Could a common historical understanding have permeated the offices of Premier Peter Malinauskas? Senior staffers might have advised their boss not to send his partisan letter to the Adelaide Writers Week boardand instead support much-needed change in the censorship history of the Festival 'game'.

The Writers Week disaster prompted Louise Adler to suggest a tourism slogan for South Australia: 'Welcome to Moscow on the Torrens'.

A slogan with a historical perspective for the Adelaide Festival could be 'Censoring for Your Comfort Since 1960'.