Speaking out on Gaza: Australian creatives and arts organisations struggle to reconcile competing pressures

The Guardian

14-06-2025

When Michelle de Kretser accepted the 2025 Stella prize on 23 May, the celebrated author shared a warning.
'All the time I was writing these words, a voice in my head whispered, 'You will be punished. You will be smeared with labels as potent and ugly as they're false,'' De Kretser told the Sydney writers' festival crowd. ''Career own goal,' warned the voice.'
Earlier in her prerecorded speech, De Kretser had denounced what she called a 'program of suppression' against creatives, scholars and journalists for 'expressing anti-genocide views' in relation to Israel and Gaza.
The speech received a standing ovation. It had been taped weeks earlier but arrived in the immediate fallout of exactly the kind of episode De Kretser was talking about.
Three days before the Stella announcement, the Martu author KA Ren Wyld revealed she had been stripped of a $15,000 black&write! fellowship from the State Library of Queensland, just hours before it was due to be announced.
A day earlier, the library's board received a written direction from the Queensland arts minister, John-Paul Langbroek, expressing his 'firm view' that Wyld should not receive the prize because of a Twitter post about the death of the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in October, which referred to him as a martyr who was 'resisting colonisation until his last breath, fighting the genocidal oppressors like a hero, sacrificing his life for love of his people and ancestral land'.
Wyld has said she was not fully aware of Sinwar's Hamas ties at the time of posting.
By the time De Kretser's speech aired, several judges of the library's Queensland Literary awards quit in protest. Sara El Sayed, an Egyptian Australian author and three-time judge was one of them. She says the minister's intervention 'undermines the whole process' of independent judging and makes it 'impossible to continue to work with the library'.
'I don't know how someone supporting the Palestinian people, supporting an oppressed people, people who are facing starvation, genocide every day … I just don't understand how the reaction is to take an opportunity away,' El Sayed says. 'That's the ultimate form of censorship, to me.'
El Sayed says many artists now grapple with a choice between taking career opportunities and standing up for their beliefs. 'I think a lot of people, especially artists, feel a moral obligation to speak out against what is occurring,' she says.
A State Library spokesperson said the library 'respects the decision of judges' and 'value[s] the conversations we have had with many judges and the writing community and acknowledge the concerns they have raised'.
The Wyld case highlights a growing crisis for arts organisations and their management in how they respond to political statements that range from mild to polarising, but may be entirely unconnected to the subject matter of the artist's work.
From the Khaled Sabsabi-Creative Australia furore to pianist Jayson Gillham's dispute with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), arts institutions have struggled to reconcile commitments to intellectual freedom and creative expression with official positions of political neutrality and intense scrutiny from media and politicians, who in some cases may have an influence on their funding.
At the MSO, the fallout has included the resignation of its longtime chief executive, high-profile event postponements and a long legal battle.
The employment lawyer Josh Bornstein, who has represented the journalist Antoinette Lattouf in her unlawful termination case against the ABC over online posts about Gaza, says in his view a 'cancel culture' fostered by pressure from sections of the media, politicians and lobby groups is leading organisations to make fast, panicked decisions.
'An organisation goes into brand management mode and the usual denouement in the post-October 7 atmosphere is to eliminate the source of complaints from the organisation,' he says, speaking generally.
But Bornstein also points to the University of Queensland's treatment of the UQP publisher Aviva Tuffield, who wore a 'Readers and Writers Against the Genocide' T-shirt to the Australian Book Industry Awards in May.
In response to questions from The Australian, the university said its freedom of speech policy allowed Tuffield to express her lawful, personal views, which did not represent the university's.
'That's the sort of approach that should be adopted,' Bornstein says.
Louise Adler is a veteran publisher and artistic director who faced criticism for programming Palestinian voices long before 7 October 2023, including Susan Abulhawa, who called the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a 'Nazi-promoting Zionist' in a social media post.
Adler says many arts organisations have tried to abstain from the issue of the war in Gaza, despite demands by many artists that they take a position and defend the artists' right to speak.
'The tensions between the boards, the management and the artists have only increased, and one arts organisation after another has either publicly buckled or privately preemptively buckled on the pretext that art is not political,' Adler says.
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'Of course, insisting on silence on the conflict in the Middle East issue is a deeply political position – it's just one that suits particular interest groups.
'The problem for arts organisations is that artists – not all artists, but many artists – want to speak to the issues of the day. So when arts managers and their boards fail to protect the right of artists to speak, a principle that should be sacrosanct, one has to question whether they have lost sight of the fundamentals.'
Adler says there are some free speech frontiers that no publicly funded arts festival or organisation would cross, but the conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and the conflation of support for Palestine with support for terrorism, has made organisations shy away from defending artists' freedom of expression.
'I think there are lines for all of us; certainly in my current role, or when I was a publisher, I am not going to offer the microphone to people who are involved in hate speech or incitement to violence or racism. I don't think that's a question of free speech.
'No decent person wants to be accused of antisemitism, of any kind of racism. But once criticism of Israel is conflated with antisemitism … you've successfully manufactured the catalogue of silenced artists we have witnessed in recent years.'
As with Creative Australia in response to the Sabsabi controversy, the State Library of Queensland announced an independent review following the withdrawal of Wyld's fellowship, the terms of which are still being prepared.
It's the latest in a pattern of reviews and consultations in the wake of contentious decision-making. Earlier this year the State Library of Victoria unveiled a 'Ways of Working' framework, developed after it canned a Teen Writing Bootcamp in 2024. Freedom of information requests subsequently revealed that library management had scrutinised the social media posts of the three authors who were due to lead the workshops for content related to the Israel-Hamas war.
In a statement the State Library of Victoria said it was 'crucial that we are a place of freedom of expression and respect for all', and that the 'sector-leading' framework established 'mutual obligations between the Library and anyone who works with us'.
Since January, writers and artists engaged by the library have been obliged to agree that when making public statements, they 'clearly state that these views and opinions do not reflect or represent the views or positions of State Library Victoria, or any other person, company or organisation' from the moment a contract is signed.
Jinghua Qian, one of the writers involved in the 2024 bootcamp, remains sceptical.
'If you contract someone for a one-hour panel or workshop, do you have the right to limit, police and punish them for their creative expression outside of that booking?' Qian wrote on Bluesky.
For some creatives, these decisions expose contradictions in institutions that have tried to diversify their audiences and offer a platform to previously under-represented voices.
Days before De Kretser's Stella speech, Nam Le, the newly crowned book of the year winner at the New South Wales Literary awards, asked a Sydney audience whether the 'goal of multiculturalism should be coexistence or cohesion'.
'If cohesion, how do we make sure that 'social cohesion' doesn't become 'social coercion' – a means of preserving the status quo, of preserving power?' Le asked, in a speech delivered by his manager.
Like De Kretser's, Le's words would only become more pointed as the week progressed.
'What good is harmony if it only and always exists on terms dictated by power? If it's built on injustice, or enforced civility – enforced silence?'