Chair quits Adelaide Festival board as writers’ week crisis continues
Four board members have now resigned, while more than 50 authors have pulled out of the event after it dropped a Palestinian-Australian writer from the program.
Adelaide Festival chair Tracey Whiting has resigned, becoming the fourth board member to quit over the decision to remove Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the Writers’ Week program.
Tracey Whiting has resigned as chair of the Adelaide Festival Board.
Whiting announced her resignation in a post to LinkedIn on Sunday evening, writing “Recent decisions were bound by certain undertakings and my resignation enables the Adelaide Festival, as an organisation, to refresh its leadership and its approach to these circumstances.”
She did not offer further comment.
With only three remaining members – Leesa Chesser, Adelaide city councillor Mary Couros, and Brenton Cox – former Adelaide Writers’ Week director Jo Dyer said on BlueSKy the board was now in breach of the Adelaide Festival Corporation Act which states, “At least 2 members must be women and at least 2 must be men.”
Last Thursday, the Adelaide Festival board announced that while it was not suggesting “in any way” that Abdel-Fattah or her writing had any connection with the Bondi attack, given her past statements “it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi”.
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The move prompted dozens of authors to pull out of the festival, including best-selling Australian author Trent Dalton.
On Monday, Dyer – who ran the event from 2019 to 2020 – said on Radio National there had been pressure over the line-up in the past but that she and other directors pushed back. This time, however, she said the board had “buckled” and would no longer be able to legally function.
“Clearly, it puts the board in an invidious position to their discredit. They were not able to withstand that pressure as they should have. But now we don’t have a functioning organisation, and it is the people of Adelaide and South Australia who are the victims of this debacle,” she said.
