Louise Adler on why she questions everything

0:00Voting is open for ABC Radio Nationals top 100 Australian books countdown. Go to abc.net.au slash top 100 books and pick up to 10 of your favourites. Choose from the Inspiration List or Adirone Title. In October we'll tally everyone's votes and countdown from 100 to number one on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen. You don't have long. Vote now at abc.net.au slash top 100 books. ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Louise Adler has been a huge figure in the world of books and ideas in Australia for decades. Publishing things that a lot of people want to hear and others would prefer to remain unsaid. Louise is famously a dynamo of activity, funny and quite fearless. She loves debate and argument. And as a publisher at Melbourne University Press, she's back to wildly diverse range of books

1:04like Tony Abbott's Battle Lines, Louise Milligan's book on George Pell, an autobiography of Melbourne Underworld figure Mick Gatto, and Mark Latham's A Conquer Line of Suck Holes. In 2021 Louise was appointed artistic director of Adelaide Writers Week. And earlier this year she was in the headlines when the premier of South Australia insisted that a guest be pulled from the festival lineup, which led to a mass withdrawal of almost every other writer and the collapse of the entire festival. I spoke with Louise Adler recently at this year's Byron Rytis Festival, Northern New South Wales in front of the live audience. Let's start with your early life Louise. Whereabouts in Melbourne did you grow up? Give me a bit of a sense of your environment as a child in the family home. Happy childhood in Beachside Melbourne, a suburb called Elwood.

2:09We would spend our summers at the beach. They were healthy in days. Good life, my parents, you know, were immigrants from Europe. It was benign, it was peaceful. They were good years, I was born in 1954. So 50s to 60s were sort of good years for people of my parents' generation, I guess. What kind of culture was in the house? You'd have to say rather prescribed. I didn't know anything about any contemporary music. I had never heard of the Beatles. I didn't know about Peter Paul and Mary and Joan Bares. That would be modern music. It was classical music every Saturday night. We would go to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. They would play God save the Queen, the MSO, and we would remain seated. And I remember every Saturday night, a lady behind me would whack me over the head with her handbag, trying to get me to stand up in my brother.

3:09And so it was the life of the mind, culture-mattered, books-mattered. Yes, it was the life of the mind that mattered. I just think that's got to be a formative experience, being the only four people or so in the whole of the town. Melville sample. Not standing for God save the Queen in the 50s and 60s. Did you develop a love of books and reading early on? Very much. I was a classic, people were going to publishing girls, who go into publishing, it's a very girly industry. Asmatic child. So spent all of the winter months in Melbourne in Baird, which is what one did, if you're on by-generation, because the medications were pretty primitive. And I was devoted to what I would call now English boarding school realism, the novels of Inna Blighten. And my grandmother would come and visit, and she would bring a dozen, you know, Inna Blighten volumes for my collection, my library.

4:10We were talking about the Magic Farrow Way too. We were talking to do with Magic all had to be about naughty girls and boarding schools, Mallory Towers. And the famous five were a bit of a stretch, but nothing to do with anything magical or fantastical all had to be domestic realism. And I would beg my mother to let me go to boarding school. Occasionally she would pick up the phone to make an appointment to see a headmistress, an imaginary headmistress, and she would have to report the disappointing news that there were no places in the boarding school. What did your parents make of all the schmolts you were reading? Ah, they were very benign. My mother was dedicated to us reading and learning the piano, all of that sort of business. My father was a very kind man, and I can remember though coming to the dinner table one evening and saying, Oh, goody, lashings of potatoes! And my father looked at my mother and said, I can't anymore, I can't take it anymore. And he went to my bedroom and removed the library of Inabliton novels.

5:13And I said, what am I going to read, daddy? What am I going to read? And he said, here you go darling, and he handed me Miller 18 from Leoniurus and Howard Fast, the last of the Macabees. And that was the end of my childhood reading. Tell me a bit more about your father. He came from Paris, didn't he? He did indeed. He was born in Paris, very common story of European jury. Both my mother and my father's parents went from Poland in probably 1920, early 1920s. And my father's family went from Poland to Paris. My mother's parents went from Poland to Berlin. So my father, because he was born in Paris, he was a French citizen, but his parents weren't born in France, so they were immigrant Jews. So his father in 1941 was in the very first roundup of Jews deported. So this is May 1941 deported to a transit camp and then sent to Ann Burke and our where he perished.

6:14His sister was sent to a French farming family in the countryside. His mother was hidden, but their apartment was sealed by the French police. And his mother was hidden by the concierge in the apartment block for the duration of the war or credit to the concierge who would have been, you know, put in jail for it would have been illegal to hide it. How did your father survive the war? And he was in the French section of the communist resistance in Paris for the duration of the war. They went and saw my father in the transit camp in May 1941, and then he was 14 years of age when he joined the resistance. Was he a communist at that stage? Yes, yes. So he was Jewish and a communist. Correct. And somehow was not arrested and... And French Jewish citizens were caught and rounded up deported later than the immigrant Jews. They first came for the immigrant Jews. You said he was a member of the resistance in France at what age? 14. Did his mother have a view on that?

7:16He asked his mother and she gave him her blessing, which I think is quite a remarkable act of courage. And her husband had been deported. She didn't know what his fate would be. So it was an act of courage and commitment and solidarity on her part to say, go and do what you need to do. And what kind of work was he doing with the resistance? So he was working in a factory and organizing strikes. And also the priority for Jewish members of the resistance, like my father, was to inform the Jewish population in Paris that they should not report to the poor. They should not report to the police when they called by the police to come and report. What that would mean would be deportation. They didn't know in 41 or 42, even I think that you would end up in a gas chamber. But they did know that you were in peril. So their political position was that it was very important to say to people, go into hiding, do whatever you can, whatever peril do not report to the cops.

8:16There were orphans whose parents had been deported to who were without money, food without shelter. They would arrange to meet children on the street at a certain moment. If they failed to make that meeting to give them whatever ration cards or food that they might have available to them, they knew that those children would go hungry until the next meeting could be arranged. So his young boys, Natalie, some boy himself, responsible as were his comrades for keeping kids alive, families alive in Paris during the war. So what happened at the end of the war after the Allies liberated Paris? So when Paris was liberated, my father and his comrades joined the French Army. My father was the youngest ever sergeant in the French Army. And they had a company, company Remont was called, all of Jewish men, who had survived, who were still in France. And they joined the French Army for the duration of the war until France was liberated. What about being reunited with these family members?

9:18So Celine, my aunt, had been in the French countryside. And when I think when Paris was occupied, his mother came to collect her, so she was safe. And my father and mother and sister waited in the hope that my grandfather would return from the construction camp he never did. And we know that he died in Birkena. So then the family came to Australia and settled in Melbourne? They did indeed. And tell me about the man that they met on a train trip from Sydney to Melbourne when they arrived. My father and his sister and mother came out on a ship called Vildomia. But these were Jewish-speaking people. And they couldn't pronounce the French properly. And so they called it the Vildomima. In Hiddish, that means the wild auntie. That was the name of the ship that they came out of. It was rather endearing. The wild auntie, well, probably was a wild ride. But anyway, so they just embarked in Sydney and are on the train coming to Melbourne.

10:19They're sitting in the carriage and there's a man opposite them. He obviously is French and French Jew. Anyway, I think all these stories of all immigrants and all refugees have got the same element of luck, coincidence, audity, peculiarity. It turns out that he was in Birkenau. And it turns out that he had known my grandfather. And the Allies in the first bombing of Birkenau during that bombing, he and my grandfather were taken down to a cellar to be protected. They were useful workers at that point. And in the Allied bombing, the cellar was bombed. And my grandfather was on one side of the cellar and this guy who survived was on the other. So that's how my grandfather died. And my family was a bit skeptical. And my grandmother had a photo of her husband, my grandfather. And so my grandmother took out this photo and there's a photo of...

11:19And we still have it of my grandfather in the transit camp in Cornelara Laund. And she said, which one is my husband? Because she wasn't sure that this was an accurate story. And he actually pointed to my grandfather. So they knew what his fate had been. The only witness to your grandfather's death was on that same train. Correct. How bizarre, how extraordinary. It's quite common that Jewish refugees from Europe that arrived in Australia kept a silence about their wartime experiences. Was it like that? Were you told these stories? Or did you have to pull them out of your father? My father, so my father politically committed character, would say that these stories I'm telling you today are... They're symptoms of bushwind of visualism. And he thought they were a waste of time. We all know our world and the other people's world through the prism of personal experience. I actually think he's got a point that actually these are imprecise, personal recollections, maybe affected by memory, not 100% accurate, and impression,

12:24and that we hold a lot, we trust in the personal story so intensely today. And he trained us a historian later in life. And his attitude was what matters is the record, is the documents, is the archives. And what his recollections are, what do you remember? Were of much less consequence. But he certainly was not repressed in his memories. But things would surface a relaturing life. I didn't know that actually at the age... I mean, just came out, someone I think we're sitting at the dinner table. He's nominated by the French Communist Party to be the person who vets every person who wants to join the resistance. I mean, his 15 years of age, I know it was a wonderful father, but must have been a pretty remarkable young man. But it just sort of came out. He hadn't repressed the memory. He didn't view that period as traumatic. He viewed it as dark. And he did a testimony to the shower foundation of quite some lengths. And he keeps talking about how tired he was.

13:27How tired everyone was. And I've got a photo of him with a star of David in a Paris street. And he's gone. He must be 15 at that age. He's gone. You understand, you know, the repetition, all what he wants to say is how tired he was. That it was exhausting. You had nothing to eat. You had nowhere to sleep. Every night you worried about how to make sure you would not be caught. You know, the pressure and the tyranny. And he remembered him telling us that the German officers would come up to you. And if the yellow star wasn't sewn on, absolutely correctly, you'd be deported. You know, it was estranged and is taxing and is not just oppressive, but is dangerous as that. He met your mother in Melbourne. She'd come there from Europe as well. Where'd she come from? So she again, her parents were Polish Jews. My grandfather had been taken as a prisoner of war to a labor camp in Germany. In the first world war, he goes back to Lodge in Poland to marry his beloved, my grandmother.

14:33And from inside the labor camp, he decides that Berlin is a much more modern place than Lodge. I think he was probably right. There's no anti-Semitism here in Berlin. It's much better than Lodge, isn't it? No pogroms here, little did you know. Anyway, so off they go. So they're probably in the early 1920s. They go to Berlin. My mum is born in Berlin in 31, I think. How long did that dream of a cultivated, civilized tolerance building last for her family? Till probably Krzysztofnacht. My grandmother always tells the story of having a shopping basket, and she was pregnant with my mum. And she would walk down the street and the Germans would come up to German. Gentlemen would come up to her and say, can you dig a flow, help her with her shopping basket and assist her? The morning after Krzysztofnacht, she's pushed off the footpath onto the road. It's clear she said is that. So 38, and he gets called up by the Gestapo to report.

15:35He says, oh, don't worry to my grandmother. You might mind the business. I'll go to a Labour camp like last time, and I'll be back soon. My grandmother pressed the young woman that she was, said, you can do that if you'd like. We're off taking my mother with a little suitcase. One suitcase overnight across the border to Switzerland. And my grandfather, who knew he had married a wise woman, decided probably she was right. Bank accounts have been closed, so the all you had was the money from the day's takings. And he tried to get someone organised to bring some money across. Of course, that money never arrived. So he came across by train the following night. And my mother remembers she's seven or eight years of age when they leave Germany, that she has to hide her little Jewish face in my grandmother's lap as they cross the border. So they all got out? They got out. And that's why my mother and my father described themselves ever. As survivors, they hadn't been incarcerated. They hadn't been bashed up. They certainly were fortunate enough not to be in concentration camps. And they survived.

16:36How did your mum and dad meet once they got to Melbourne? So my mother says that when she was 15 years of age, she was at some event. And she saw my father bending down to talk to his mother. And she went home to my grandmother and said, I've met the man I'm going to marry. My grandmother said, go to bed, darling. And at 18, my mother did what she was always going to do, which was marry my father. That was it. How did they get on with a natural couple? And did they speak a niche of home? Well, my father's, the Jewish apparently wasn't great. And his mother spoke Giddish. At home, they would speak Giddish. My grandparents spoke Giddish, my parents spoke Giddish. We spoke English. It was all, you know, a compote, we would say. The war had curtailed their, their educations quite substantially. Did they want to then pursue that? They did indeed the life of the mind. I can remember, I've got strong memories of my parents sitting at two desks in the, what we used to call the den, in the probably the 60s, early 60s.

17:36They did adult metric together, then they did their bachelor of arts together. And that was what they wanted to do. They wanted the life of the mind, education. My mum read English and my father did history. That was the passion. So you grew up, you put aside Ian and Blighten in favour of, I'm guessing dirty books by Philip Roth or something like that. I think that my mother, no, no, no, no. And we went to see my knight at Mord. I don't know if anyone knows the film. I can't remember the filmmaker. And my mother, there was some scene of Ive Montal, you know, one of my heroes. And I think he's in bed. I can't remember who he's in bed with and he's smoking. And my mother said, that's his children. We're going, we had to leave the cinema. Because you know, good people don't want the children watching films with people in bed. All the bourgeoisie individualism totally. Totally. Okay. So it's 17, you moved to Israel for a few years after school. Why did you want to go to Israel? Was there a religious impetus or a cultural one? None whatsoever. No, certainly.

18:36Totally. We call ourselves deeply secular atheist Jews. But I had been in a socialist youth movement. What we did in those days from the age of about eight to eight, 17. And the trajectory was normally to go to a keyboard. My parents weren't having a brother. They thought that was a waste of time. You need to go to university. So they agreed that I could go to Israel for some a holiday with you coming back to go to university. And I got there and I thought it was just, well, it was the absolute antithesis of Melbourne. Jerusalem was so beautiful. The stone, the history, the kind of life, this dynamic, aggressive, rich kind of world. It felt like to me. But I do remember my very first moment. You can get off the plane. And I realized the epiphany hits me. I think we'll all be dancing the horror. You know, the Israeli dance on the tarmac. And I realized that it's the Ashkenazi Jews who are stamping my passport. It's the Mizrachi, the oriental Jews who are doing confiling the paperwork.

19:38And it's Palestinians who are cleaning the toilets. And so that's my epiphany. I realized that the socialist utopia that I thought I was coming to was not that at all. So 1973, you're there when Junkupur war breaks out? Correct. And Israel got the fright of its life. But fought back and succeeded in the end. How did that affect you? Did you make it as soon as you leave Israel at that point? And my parents had come to visit. And my mother, who had suffered anti-Semitism in Australia, felt at home there. They weren't sirens. There was no sirens, sort of, you know, ideology in our commitment in our family. It all, it wasn't part of my growing up. But they felt very at home. She felt very at home there. But when the Junkupur war broke out, I don't think my father or mother had the wish to be there. Certainly not as tourist during a war and felt inappropriate. And so they decided we should all decamp to England. So that's where you study literature. You're in the home at last of Inidbliton.

20:41All that cosiness. All that cosiness. All that cosiness. Did that please you or were you long past at that point? Well, a traumatic moment there where I had gone to Reading University. And those were the days when you read one subject or maybe two. So I read all of Dickens. You read all of the cantaportas. You read everything. You're all a Shakespeare. It was just a fantastic education for someone who only really wanted to read novels. You know, really. So for someone with my limited capacity and interest, it was Halcyon days. But I went to the halls of residence in Reading University that night, the first night, and the meal was spam fritters, baked beans, and mashed potatoes. And I'd come from Israel. I thought Louise, don't think this is for you. So I went and lived in London and commuted to Reading. So never mind the life of the mind. The spam fritters did you end up in the end of that? They did me end up in the whole super that you know, it was just very depressing. So then you got to the United States to New York to study at Columbia University.

21:43And that's where you met and studied under the Palestinian intellectual Edward Sayed. How well did you get on with Edward Sayed? Extremely well. I wanted to write my thesis on Marxist aesthetics. Basically, why Marxists think that the realest novel of the 19th century is the high point of literary culture. And I happened to agree. So I wanted to write my PhD on that subject. And good supervisors set you straight. He said, great idea Louise. That'll take you 40 years. How about, we work on Michelle Fruco, who was all the rage at that point, right? So I agreed. And we got on very well. Our politics were obviously aligned by that point. I was pretty clear about, you know, the injustice of the plight of Palestinians, the occupation, what this all meant, what the nut bow was all about. He was the engaged intellectual of the 20th century. So it was a great honour to be supervised by him. He asked me if I would be his teaching assistant for three years. Just what a wonderful mentorship I had.

22:43Was he a popular figure? It's a popular... Popular. Charisma on steroids. Extremely handsome character. But all I can remember is the women's toilets were full of graffiti about Edward Sayed. Full of graffiti. Very dashing figure. But I was a short semi. He was a tall semi. It wasn't... You know, there was nothing improper. Let me be very clear in the relationship. It wasn't you writing that graffiti then? Definitely not. So what brought you back to Australia while you're having this extraordinary life and academic career in... Do I want to say this? My father, lovely guy, lovely, lovely human being, but capable of strategy when required. I think he was 50 years of age. I came back to visit the family. And he said, I've only got 10 good years left, Louise. So if you choose to live in America, that's your choice. I went back to the States on Monday, on Thursday, packed up and came back to Australia. He was very strategic.

23:43And we have a son who lives in London now. And I should have said the same thing to him. And I didn't. I'm very upset with my son. So then you started teaching as an academic at Melbourne University. How did academic life suit you? It didn't. And I'd been a grad school at Columbia University. People do liberal arts abroad education in their undergraduate studies in America. By the time they get to grad school, they're pretty focused. I was there at such a great moment in that particular faculty around the Department of English and the Parade of Literature. And I came back to Australia and I had been given a job as a tutor in the English department. I was very lucky to get that tutorship. But all I can remember is that the morning tea would be quite a lot of silence. And a lot of looking at the carpet and an occasional discussion of cricket. And compared to Columbia, New York, Edward Seid, comparative literature, Marxist, feminist, theory, this felt very dry to me.

24:44And I also wasn't an academic. I didn't love the idea of being a scholar, of the pleasure of research and scholarship, what you find in the archives. That was not, I didn't feel that was me. So this job came up at Australian Book Review and I was lucky enough to get it. That was the beginning of the time in publishing, I guess. And what was so different about that? Why were you much happier doing that work as opposed to being an academic? Well, my husband would say that I am, I think he was, I've got a number of skills. I hope he would say that. But he would say that one skill I do have is the capacity to ring people up. I didn't seem to have any embarrassment about ring people up and say, will you review X? Will you write Y? Will you do this? What about that? And so it's a great pleasure for me. It's the beginning of my understanding about myself that I love that business of matchmaking and matchmaking ideas and writers, writers and ideas. I think of you and I think, oh, I'd love you to write on X. Why don't you write this and, you know, there's this book, what about doing a book like that here?

25:46That sort of ability to help and to encourage. And I must say that all the men I've ever encountered have asked to write books apart from you, Richard, of course, who's knocked me back countless times, let it be said. I've been thwarted by other equally excellent publishers. But the men always say, oh, yes, that's a great idea. And the women who have approached us say, oh, look, no, I don't, why don't you ask so and so? Or why don't you just, they've been always linked to it. And then they say, I adlarise them into writing the book. And I'm thinking, I don't think that's quite what happened here. Around this time you met your husband, the great satirist, comedian and actor Maxkelees is here today. How were the two of you set up by your friends? Well, I was about to go back to New York. I told my dear friend, Sue Gore, that there were no decent men left in, let's be frank, there were no decent men left in Melbourne in Australia.

26:52And she said, well, there's only one loyal steadfast and kind man left that I could suggest. And his name's Em Gilles, right? And so she said, okay, we'll make a barbecue in the backyard and you can come and you're going to check him out. And I came and I was so embarrassed, I mean, setting updates, it's not for me, it's really not my thing. So I ran away. And she said, okay, Louise. And her partner is Bill Garner. And Bill was ideologically opposed to matchmaking and setups and things like that. So Sue said, we're going to have a dinner. It's just going to be a four of us and that's it. Max, of course, was oblivious because it tends to be oblivious to these things. But anyway, Sue and I were on a mission here. I had gone out and bought, you know, in those days, an extremely expensive but very cheap looking black t-shirt dress. So to make no effort to make an enormous amount of effort, right? So I get dressed, a perfume, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the business, right?

27:53And get ready to go, I shut the door and I realized I've left the keys inside, have to ring a locksmith. I think, I've got plenty of time because I'm always early, he's always late but I'm always early. And so I go inside and I get the keys and a girlfriend rings to say, good luck Louise. And I say, I've got to go now, now I'm nearly running late. I go out, I've left the keys in the house again. It locksmith comes back and says, you've got a problem lady. I said, definitely got a problem lady. So I think, what are we? $50 later, $60 later. Anyway, go in. I do it a third time, right? And I realized that it was my mother sitting on my shoulder saying, hmm, Louise is an actor. He isn't Jewish and he's 40. This was then deemed the, you know, and the holy trinity of the issues around embigilities, right? Anyway, we've survived 40 odd years together so it turned out to be okay. When we bonded, I have to say the point is that we bonded and Sue and Bill were asleep on the chair as well, Max and I sit on the couch.

29:00And we bonded over a Woody Allen film, Love and Death. It was a beautiful exquisite Woody Allen film. And he said that he hadn't met anyone else in Melbourne who really enjoyed Woody Allen. So that was the beginning of a happy marriage. One of the things I think that has characterized you both as a publisher and as a festival director is that it's a strange thing to say, but you take humor seriously. You think humor is important because it is. There's some strange thing that goes through our culture that says the humor is light entertainment and it's anything. But do you think you get some of that from Max or some from your family background? This willingness to take humor seriously. Very much. It certainly was in the family background, but also for Max. I mean, he's, you know, I think he's a momma, I have to say, it is a comic genius. But I did, I actually, yes. But I did have one moment. One, you know, talk about traumatic memories of Max had to get glasses at some point. And then he rolls over in bed to talk to me, to talk to me.

30:01Let's keep it nice. And to talk to me. And I think, oh my god, I'm sleeping with Malcolm Fraser. It's just terrifying. You know, you sort of peered over the glasses anyway. And I had not ever wanted to sleep with Malcolm Fraser. Let's be quite clear. Life wasn't meant to be easy, but take heart my child and can be delightful. So fast forward to your brilliant career, Louise. You became the publishing director of Reed Books, then art editor at the age. You had a stint working at the ABC. 2003, you became chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing. What was your brief at the time when they put you in that job? Hello, McFee. The great Australian, the doyen of Australian independent publishing had written a review and her editorial brief was that we should engage in the public conversation. And that the task was primarily, or in the first instance,

31:03to find academics whose work could, with our assistance, be rendered public, be given public expression. Academics write quite specialist language. And defensively, too. Because they need to and footnote everything. And so they write in a very defensive way, but that's not very outward looking to the general public. Correct. Correct. So could we assist at MUP, part of our brief was to assist academics. Those who were willing and interested in engaging with the public sphere. And my experience in universities, both as a publisher and on the Monash University Council, was this extraordinary research being done that is incredibly important to the general community and that there's not enough outward focus by the academy in terms of its engagement with what we in the general community want to know about our lives, what we understand, and what that research does to impact on our lives. So I was really delighted to have the opportunity to do that.

32:05So when you began to focus on Australian history, and Australian historians bringing their work to a general public, to a wider audience, how did that unfold? Tell me the pleasure you got from doing that. Well, one of the early books I published was by Stuart McIntyre, a foremost Australian historian, no longer with us. And I asked him because there have been all those arguments with Heath Winshuttle and Jeffrey Blaney about Australia, about colonial past, how we recognise that, what acknowledgement we give to the first nations of Australia, and Stuart had been involved in those discussions. But they had been really principally played out in the academy and in the Murdoch press. And I thought it would be really important if could I persuade Stuart to write a book called The History Wars, and that was one of the first books we did, and it was a very successful book. And I was really pleased because it gave us, those of us who are not historians, not scholars of the area, an understanding of what was at stake.

33:06And I also published works from many political figures, including Mark Latham, his famous spree's Affability, Generosity of Spirits, the ability to just let things slide. Tell me about working with Mark Latham. Interesting. Well, his book was formidable success. He's a very interesting complex character. I knew he could rise. I really did know he'd got it, because he'd been writing and written books that were influential and important prior to the Latham diaries. And I think he also, I think at that point, he was starting to write in the fin review, if I remember correctly, really interesting articles. His book from the suburbs is a really good book. Indeed, indeed. It's full of ideas. Yeah. And I thought, you know, people were critical of the Latham diaries. Oh, he didn't write, he wrote it early, or it's sort of rewritten. It's not actually a contemporaneous diary. For me, that wasn't the issue. It's like all of the biographies. And autobiographies that people write. If you think they're going to be absolutely accurate,

34:08if you think they're not going to be self-serving, you're in the wrong business, you know. They are one person's view of their life, often with a kind of lovely Vaseline around the screen, Hazy, Rosie, Hugh, you know, about all the good work they did. And so Latham's diaries, I thought were revelatory, and they were his view of the Labor Party, were they accurate? Doesn't matter, really, in a sense. They were his view. And so it was very interesting working with him. I think, and didn't agree with them, you know, gender-politics, certain, for example, had not been a question that preoccupied him. And, you know, any discussion of that was just wipe to side. But all you can be as an editor is an engaged ally in the process. Well, what did he treat you like an ally or an enemy? I was an ally until I wasn't. There was a national security question, a risk of a national security breach. And at almost the 11th hour, it looked like the book was not going to be published.

35:11And we had to get, there were lawyers, 50 paces, and so on and so forth. We managed to get over that. So in the end, it was a very successful book. And we then published his dictionary, the Congolain of Suck Holes, a attractive title. And I rang him up, and he had all these aphorisms from a variety of people. I said, you know, publishing, we have to kind of acknowledge, you know, it's copyright people's aphorisms that's sort of their own, really. And I can't use this language, or you could be but out. He's last words to me, you're an effing idiot, and hung up on me. Right, that was the last time I spoke to Mark Latham. You also published Tony Abbott's book, Battle Line. So that would have gotten you something. There's no need for that. Let's keep it nice. That would have been a popular decision in some part of Melbourne's left wing publishing circles.

36:11Even in some homes, there was some just a little shit, a little shit, a close to home. And I thought it was really important that we were in the business, certainly as a publisher in the business of the contest of ideas. However, I did believe that we couldn't be a left wing pamphleteer. I mean, that was not the brief for MUP. And we had to seek out those conservatives who had an argument to prosecute. And I thought that it was incumbent upon us to do that where we could. There was a brief period, a couple of years, where I went to work for Hachet. One of the big three, four publishers in the world. And it was a wonderful experience. It was completely counter to the intimate, very, very happy team of about 15 or 16 at MUP. We had a wonderful time working together. But Hachet was a very commercial, rigorous company, and equally good morale in the business. But it was very interesting for me, the disciplines and the procedures and the processes of working in a commercial publishing company.

37:18You were then appointed the director of Adelaide Wright as week. How did you take what you'd learnt in publishing and changing or in liveening the national conversation to that role as the director of a major writers festival? Well, it was the best of publishing in a sense without having to worry about advances that not earning out about books that would end up as what we now call distressed stock, rather than remainder tables. It had none of that. I didn't have to worry about sales. I didn't have to worry about persuading marketers and salespeople that this book was worth supporting as a publisher. So it was just the best. Adelaide became, for that period in your tenure, the best writers festival in Australia. Everyone was saying that. Authors were saying that at the time. It became this place of robust ideas. And it seemed to be a bit of a pushback at the time against the need for safe spaces. The need for safe spaces. What was your view on that? So, and I'd heard the term from Americans that they don't have safe spaces. They want brave spaces.

38:23And for me, that didn't mean that all ideas of equal value. I'm not a believer in both ciderism. I don't think all issues have both sides that are worth hearing. And people, my view, that is dogmatism on my part. But I didn't think that was my brief. Right as festivals aren't debating societies. There could be forums for ideas. But you've got an artistic director, a curator. It's their job to shape, curate a program around the ideas that they think and the writers and the voices that they think their audience will be interested in. So, the kind of particular interest that I have informed my festival directorship. That's why you get appointed to the job, isn't it? You bring your own sensibilities to curate it as festival director, right? Correct. Correct. So, for me, for example, I thought that, and this was before October 7th, before, you know, the most recent crisis in the Middle East, that Palestinian writing was flourishing, had always been flourishing in a Middle East and cultural environment.

39:30And that we in Australia knew very little about Palestinian literature and ideas. And so, in 2023, I brought together five or six Palestinian writers to talk about their work. News limited went berserk. You know, the Israel lobby went berserk. And, you know, it was all this caffuffle in the media about this, the outrage of these individuals who had social media feeds that some would view as offensive or, you know, controversial or upsetting. As it happens, Adelaide intensely civilised gentile environment where everybody listened with courtesy to whatever was being spoken about and asked questions with the same level of respect and courtesy. And we, the citizens, were privileged to listen to writers speaking about their work, their craft, and the ideas that shaped them. And I think that was the point, but people took great offence at particular Palestinian writers and their position. But when we went on, as soon as the festival began, all that seemed to slide away.

40:33And we went on, and discussions were held. So that brings us to this year's Adelaide writers week. Most of us here know the story of what happened. You'd programmed the Palestinian-Australian author, Randa Atlfata, the board and the premier. Let it be known that they wanted her pulled from the program, the festival collapsed by the mask withdrawal from authors and presenters. It was a total, an absolute debacle. In some sense, do you think this is a result of that idea of safe spaces being picked up by the writers as well as the left? Well, I think it was that the premier Malin-Ansker, who suggested in his letter to the board, which he was then happy to publish in the advertiser and the Australian, that to invite Randa Atlfata to Adelaide would be insensitive and culturally insensitive. The given bondie, that this would be objectionable, that this would be injurious to the safety of those who might be attending.

41:39What did you think when you saw that letter? I thought it was absolutely, well, A absurd, B remarkable instance of political interference, a double backflip by a premier who two years ago had declared that if politicians were to be involved in cultural matters, we might as well live in Putin's Russia. So I thought it was a remarkable triple pike, some assault, whatever, whatever, the calisthenic description would be by the premier. And of course, with a festival that's fully funded by the state government, for them to say, well, that's very interesting, Premier Malin-Ansker. Thank you for your view, but we're going to uphold the independence of our curator and of our curatorial judgment, of our artistic director's curator or of the judgment. We will proceed and we will cut the flag, whatever the commentary is in the media or in the public sphere, by the general population. And they chose not to do that, but of course, when he's got his hand on the till, although Premier Malin-Ansker said, oh no, no, I would never have pulled the funding.

42:46That was what was in jeopardy in my humble opinion. And the question for me remains, one Palestinian voice, one Palestinian writer coming to speak for one hour about one novel on that basis, the issue is so serious that you're prepared to put in jeopardy and risk the cancellation of an entire festival. And it tells me how important and significant is the moral catastrophe, the human catastrophe that's going on in Gaza, that this is what was required to prevent one Palestinian speaking. Behind the scenes, there are a lot of corporate people from the corporate world on the boards of arts organizations. Often they bring a welcome commercial expertise to a board. Can they be a little naive when it comes to cultural matters, more naive than they realize they might be?

43:46No, naive or un-awarely. Well, I think that's a very kind way to put it. I think that we need boards with an understanding of governance, of the roles of boards, management and the artists, want to talk about particularly about arts organizations, and we need them to understand the work that we're doing is the work in the arts, in arts organizations of cultural, cultural endeavor. And I think that they bring particular expertise, legal expertise, commercial expertise, all of those risk analysis, all of that, we need those on boards, but they actually also need to understand that the business of the organization is artists, and the artist has to be at the centre of what we do. Just finally, in 2008, you went on a trip to Berlin with your mum to her old hometown. Tell me about that. My mother never had German cars, German things in the house, like many, many European Jews, and we didn't have any of those things.

44:50So she would never have had a melee up and nor any of those German things, or German cars or any of that business. And she had never wanted to go back to Berlin, but they, I think probably like most German towns, Germany has made a great deal of effort in recent years to invite, well in this case, Berlin adjooms back to Berlin to honour them, to make amends, if you like moral reparations of sort of, yes, to make moral reparations, if you like, to say this is your place to, even though you were deported, you were exiled, and all the rest of it. So it was a very interesting trip. What we did realise, and I had been to Berlin a couple of times before, and I remember taking my parents, you know, we do like a food hall, and it's probably, you know, coffee and cake is very important to us. And we went to Cadevets, the big department store, and I took them up to the food hall, I think it's on the seventh floor, and it was a dazzling array of schnitzel and ribread and potato salad.

45:52And I realised that that's the food of my birth, you know, instead of milk, it was probably potato salad and schnitzel that I was, you know, nurtured on. And so there was so much in common, you know, that my mother was deeply of that place. She had left it seven years of age, but it was so much about our lives in modern Australia that was connected to Germany and to Berlin. So it was a very important event for us. And I'm very grateful of Barron Bay, please give a big thank you to Louise Adlam. Huge thanks to Jess and Claire from the Barron Riders Festival, the crew of the Barron Theatre, and Steve Fieldhouse for the recording. Podcast and broadcast. This is conversations with Richard Fideler.

47:06He had more conversations any time on the ABC Listen app. This conversation was produced in the lands of the Araquale and Gadigal peoples, was produced by Maggie Morris, and executive producer is Nicola Harrison. I'm Richard Fideler. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to a podcast of conversations with Richard Fideler. For more conversations episodes, head to ABC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. You