Filed under: PUBLISHED WORK
Arts Hub Australia, 25th August 2008
Rosemary Cameron is back – if not with a vengeance, then at the very least with its more affable relation.
Cameron, who has just had her three-year tenure as Director of the increasingly robust Melbourne Writers Festival extended to take in the 2009 season, speaks with a kind of refined zeal of this year’s program and the developmental progress of an event relegated by some to runt status when held up against its Adelaide, Brisbane or Sydney counterparts.
In a city known for lovingly preening its cultural plumage, the hard facts of attendance numbers can elicit a faintly ignominious blush. The situation is now both compounded and redeemed by the recent announcement of Melbourne’s successful bid to be UNESCO’s second City of Literature (Edinburgh took out the inaugural spot in 2004). While the announcement can only precipitate growth for the Festival, some seem flustered by having been caught, as one of the nation’s more diminutive players, with their literary pants down. However Cameron, who has been on the Brisbane side of the fence, seems flushed only with optimism for a festival that, rather than di- or re-gressing, appears to be very satisfactorily progressing.
The 2007 Melbourne Writers Festival brought home the biggest box office bacon in the Festival’s then-21-year history. This year, the combination of continued natural growth and a venue shift to Federation Square from the hallowed spaces of Southbank’s Malthouse Theatre have seen what Cameron describes as “a very ambitious budget” met before the first page was turned.
“Last year was our previous most successful year in terms of box office and attendances and we outstripped last year about a week ago,” she says. “It’s been a hugely well-received program and I think a part of that is the move to Federation Square.”
Cameron credits the manifold conveniences of Melbourne’s uneasy civic icon with an increase in attendance. Federation Square is home to or neighbour of myriad cafes, bars and, not least, public amenities. Public transport abounds and the Festival has capitalised on its position across from the ever-illuminated mouth of Flinders Street Station to net commuters heading back from arguably less stimulating pursuits.
“We’ve got events at 6 o’clock to catch people on their way home from work,” says Cameron. “You don’t want to make your festival difficult; it’s all about making it easy for people to access it.”
The question of access is one that could equally be turned to the content of a writers festival: where does one start when creating a public event out of both sides of the very solitary literary coin? Reading and writing are rarely done communally – or rather, the cognitive experience of each is not a group affair. Within a festival context, reading becomes performance, while writers – the artists – sit under the spotlight to represent themselves and their work, rather than the inverse emphasis that characterises the performing arts.
Cameron believes that, while this contrast with other species of arts festivals may make for a more sober perception of writers festivals, the immediacy of unrehearsed encounters with minds that are both creative and eloquent can create an equally dynamic atmosphere.
“Things can happen in the morning news that are picked up by writers in events during the day, so there’s a very immediate response… that other festivals lack because of their rehearsed nature,” says Cameron. “Because writers festivals are not presenting the works of art [themselves]… you actually get to meet the artists. It is quite interesting [to see] how that works and how you [can] create a festival out of it.”
Just how the MWF team has created a festival out of it seems a somewhat nebulous concept even to Cameron, who deliberated over one or two themes before yielding to the spontaneity of watching invited writers’ mutual traits or enthusiasms cluster to form a Russian contingent; a strong field of writers examining terror, its manifestations and our collective responses to them; or mini-series of lectures on philosophy or writing indigenous policy. With over 300 programmed events, the imposition of rigid themes can restrict audience engagement.
Some cities seemingly make a distinction between writers and thinkers in creating separate events for each, but the dividing line would seem to be more of a grey expanse and Cameron argues that the two can very happily bunk down together. When a large fraction of the festival’s focus rests on the content rather than the form of a writer’s work, the ideas around which that content is curled are dragged into the glare.
“You’ve got a choice: you can look at the content of the book or you can look at the actual mechanics of getting the book written. When you start looking at the content, anything and everything can be talked about; it really opens up into a festival of ideas.”
The blossoming of discussions of particular works into full-scale dissections of their theoretical roots is a significant drawcard for MWF patrons. Yet there is an equally ravenous audience for the Festival’s mechanics classes.
Spread over each of the Festival’s two weekends is a series of masterclasses and workshops aimed at both emerging and established writers. With 43 per cent of respondents to a recent demographic survey of MWF attendees having described themselves as writers, the market for guidance is just as strong as at many young and emerging writers festivals, where the craft and business of what it is to write and be a writer are traditionally very central to the audience’s interest. Each person has a command of language and the ability to form ideas, but putting the two together can, upon closer examination, prove more difficult and delightful than one might presume.
“There are a lot of people who have it in the back of their mind that they’d like to write a book at some stage,” says Cameron. “Even with a general public audience I think there’s a great interest in the craft of writing. People love backstage tours and that’s what these events are like.”
The 2008 Melbourne Writers Festival program caters to almost every stock phrase in the demographical lexicon, yet overarching the whole as the Keynote Address speaker is Germaine Greer, a woman not known for being everything to everyone. Greer’s opening night examination of the many faces and places of rage references her recent short book entitled, fittingly, On Rage. An admirer of Greer, Cameron was thrilled to secure an address that has doubtless lent a refreshing piquancy to the program.
A name as redoubtable as Greer’s is contrasted with relative newcomer Nam Le, a man not known to many – yet. Cameron describes Le, who has recently published his first book of short stories, as “top of my pops”. The Edinburgh International Book Festival clearly agrees, having selected Le to be beamed in via satellite in an event exchange that saw Salman Rushdie’s digital incarnation grace a screen the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on Sunday.
The programming of such an exchange takes on a serendipitous glow in the light of UNESCO’s announcement last week – yet one more indication to Melburnians that their celebration of the written word can only continue to make them blush with pride.
