As someone who has been attending this Festival as a reader for decades, I still hold memories of the bright yellow umbrellas down at Walsh Bay and the smell of wool trapped in the wooden piers from their working days. I remember seeing some of my favourite authors share the privacies of their brains – writers like Damon Galgut, Hanya Yanigahara, Paul Lynch, Tara June Winch and many more. I’ve always felt there to be something so special about reading an author’s book in the lead up to the Festival and then hearing them speak about it themselves the week after you turn that final page, full of questions.
So, needless to say, listening to Yvonne Weldon’s Welcome to Country and Ann Mossop’s introduction to the Gala, this time as an invited author, was a downright thrill. Truthfully.
And wasn’t that just the word of the night. TRUTH. The elder sibling to trust and honesty that, in theory, forms the order of our society. But in practice? Well, that’s another story.
Bay 17 was abuzz, as Kirli Saunders (along with Tania Bowra), Michael Pedersen, Robbie Arnott, Lily King and Nikita Gill grappled with notions of truth, connection and nuance in a world intent on destroying all three.
Each speaker’s words tonight were tinged with loss – a palpable sense of what is at stake if we lose our connection with the truth. Kirli Saunders suggested we look to the “ancient truths held in stars and stone”. Crossing artforms and treating us to poetry, song and essay, she showed us the importance of putting down the phone and listening hard to the land before it’s too late.
Robbie Arnott similarly implored us to keep focusing on the truths held in the landscapes around us, instead of blithely hiking on with our heads down. The land keeps the score.
American Lily King acknowledged that she hails from a country where truth has all but lost its way, a country where “two plus two equals five”. She spoke of fiction as a chain of invented facts and scenarios that can create the truth, her work now squarely rooted in matters of the heart. Michael Pedersen told us of the loss of his best friend and his mission to remember all the good things about him. Perhaps that’s what we all need to do with truth – remember all its ‘good things’ before it becomes something else we have to grieve?
I was particularly moved by the words of Nikita Gill. She lost her grandfather, her champion, a year ago to the day. She recounted for us the moment that her grandfather asked what she wanted her legacy to be. When she promptly began to answer he told her “Stop. Let things percolate before you speak.”
If only the leaders, change-makers, internet worm-holers, conspiracists, indeed any lost souls unable to grasp that misty thing called nuance could heed Nikita’s grandfather’s advice.
Last night reminded me that nuance is becoming a finite resource. Nuance feels like a luxury – a tiny Michaelangelo hammer chipping away at marble to create the perfect angle. But people are tired, and there is only so much a tiny hammer can do. War crimes on the nightly news, centuries of racism, an uptick in online polarisation, the erosion of expertise and a surge in mind-boggling levels of hypocrisy has seen people start reaching (understandably) for a sledgehammer.
The very word itself, nuance, brings with it an arty lightness. Beginning as the Latin nūbēs, meaning "cloud”, it morphed into Middle French to become nuer (“to shade”) and eventually to nuance, meaning a “shade of colour”. Its very essence is hard to grasp – misty and impermanent. No wonder it’s in danger.
There was hope too, of course. Lily King reminded us that “we have the tyrants outnumbered” and Nikita Gill sent us out into the Festival with this pearl of a thought: "Writers are archivists of the heart, that museum of muscle”.
And ain’t that the truth…
