It began as a quiet programming dispute in the genteel city of churches.

But by Wednesday morning, a frantic, six-day war of words had culminated in the end of the 2026 Adelaide writers’ week and total institutional collapse.

What started with the discreet exit of a business titan and arts board veteran spiralled into boardroom carnage last weekend, with mass resignations, lawyers’ letters of demands and allegations of racism and hypocrisy flung by all sides.

By the time the writers’ week director, Louise Adler, walked, the boycott of writers, commentators and academics had gone global and the state’s premier cultural event had become a hollowed-out shell.

The cancellation of AWW may only be the opening act. The wreckage has now cleared the way for a supreme court showdown between the state’s telegenic – and until now, Teflon – premier, Peter Malinauskas, and the polemic Palestinian Australian academic Randa Abdel-Fattah – the writer at the heart of the row, whose invitation to the 2026 event was withdrawn less than two weeks ago.

At the centre of the looming legal battle is the premier’s now-notorious Bondi analogy that even Malinauskas’s allies admit may have finally scratched his protective coating.

‘Spewing anti-Zionism’

The seeds of this spectacular collapse were sown not in the heat of January but in the spring thaw of last October, with the resignation of Tony Berg, a former managing director of Macquarie Bank and Boral, and a key festival benefactor. The resignation may have been discreet but the letter sent to the festival’s board and the South Australian government on 22 October was a snapshot of a board in its last throes, allegedly held hostage by an unyielding artistic director.

Berg, a self-described Zionist and a governor of the Israel Australia Chamber of Commerce, accused the festival’s leadership of presiding over a “blatantly one-sided” mission that had traded open debate for a “vendetta against Israel and Zionism”.

He alleged that Adler had resolutely failed to provide balance in her programming since her appointment in 2022, and of “spewing anti-Zionism” through her choice of speakers. Abdel-Fattah came to national attention with an Instagram post declaring “Zionists have no claim or right to cultural safety” shortly after the conflict broke out in Gaza. For Berg, her inclusion in the 2026 lineup was the final “travesty” – a move he claimed crossed the line from political criticism into the territory of antisemitism.

Watching the fallout from the other side of the world this week, Berg doubled down on his position.

On Sunday Guardian Australia reported on a leaked letter from the board saying a Jewish New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman, had been cancelled from the 2024 program due to scheduling issues. On Tuesday Berg issued a statement accusing both Adler and Abdel-Fattah of displaying a “selective” and “utterly hypocritical” approach to free speech, alleging that it was Adler and Abdel-Fattah who had led the charge to de-platform Friedman, who had written a controversial column comparing the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.

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According to Berg, Adler and the festival’s top leadership had issued a comply-or-resign ultimatum to the board to force Friedman’s withdrawal, an irony Berg noted was seemingly lost on the authors boycotting the festival.

Adler reacted by attacking Berg’s integrity as a board member but has neither confirmed nor denied she issued an ultimatum.

Abdel-Fattah disputes the allegation that she, along with Adler, led the charge to cancel Friedman, but does not deny she was one of 10 Indigenous and academics of colour “who wrote a researched letter with references and footnotes about the harm of racial tropes”.

“We write letters on Google Docs to boards,” she said. “The people who want to cancel us have premiers intervening.”

Since last Thursday Malinauskas has been steadfast in his denials of any direct interference, insisting that the board had acted independently. He pointed to his own defence of the festival in 2023 – when he resisted calls to pull funding for the event over a different set of Palestinian writers – as proof of his longstanding commitment to artistic autonomy.

But he has admitted that he began to lobby for Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the writers’ week around Christmas, when he had “a number” of conversations with the board chair, leading to him penning a letter to the board on 2 January, “advocating” his point of view.

According to political observers on the ground in North Terrace, the fingerprints of political interference are difficult to ignore. By the time the board took action the premier’s office had effectively seeded local press with enough “security and harmony” concerns to ensure the author’s removal was viewed as an act of public safety, rather than a political hit.

‘Despicable’

During the collective national grief over the Bondi terrorist attack, the festival’s board and the SA government quietly conducted a cultural safety audit. In between Christmas and new year festivities, it reached its terminal conclusion.

The board chose to ignore concerns raised by Adler during these deliberations – but she was not the only one. With the Venice Biennale and Bendigo writers’ festival debacles still fresh in public memory, the festival’s executive director, Julian Hobba, warned the board during multiple meetings of the inevitable fallout from any move to dump a writer on the grounds of their strident political views.

Nevertheless on the morning of 8 January the board allowed the first domino to fall.

Abdel-Fattah’s response to her cancellation was swift, framing the decision not as an act of community harmony but one of “blatant and shameless” anti-Palestinian racism and censorship. The board’s attempt to associate her with the Bondi massacre was “despicable”, she said.

The influential progressive thinktank the Australia Institute fired the next salvo, abruptly withdrawing its partnership and sponsorship.

What followed was a global literary mutiny. By the time the headline act – the former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern – confirmed she was pulling out on Monday, more than 70 literary luminaries had already turned the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden into a contagion site, announcing their boycott of the 2026 event on social media or via their agents. The British novelist Zadie Smith, the Pulitzer prize winner Percival Everett, the Greek economist and firebrand Yanis Varoufakis and the Russian-American journalist M Gessen, along with the local star attractions Helen Garner, Melissa Lucashenko and Michelle de Kretser, were among them.

At least as many participants again had quietly informed either AWW or Adelaide festival management they were pulling out – and behind the scenes, festival organisers were begging the legendary British band Pulp and their uncompromising frontman, Jarvis Cocker, not to formally cancel their contract to play at the festival’s free opening night concert on 27 February at Elder Park.

The premier’s carefully curated message of social cohesion was being lost in the static of an international outcry.

And Adler retreated to the tranquility of her home, tuning out the persistent thrum of media inquiries and quietly drafting her resignation manifesto.

Open letter

On Saturday morning the board met to discuss crisis management. It was “not enjoyable”, according to the wry understatement of one person present.

“It’s not over by a long shot,” said another.

Before them was an open letter from the elder statesman of the SA arts scene, Rob Brookman, a former executive director and artistic director of the Adelaide festival. Demanding the immediate reinstatement of Abdel-Fattah, it was signed by luminaries of festivals past, including the former artistic directors Neil Armfield, Peter Sellars, Jim Sharman and Anthony Steel. By Monday that list of signatures would grow to 17, including Stephen Page and Robyn Archer.

By the meeting’s end, the exodus had begun. Nicholas Linke, a senior partner at the major law firm Dentons, and the board’s primary legal expertise, was the first to walk. Then departed Donny Walford, the founding director of the leadership and coaching company Behind Closed Doors, and Daniela Ritorto, a former BBC journalist and wife to federal health minister Mark Butler.

Its chair, Tracey Whiting, switched the lights off with her own resignation at the meeting’s end.

On Sunday, unaware the board was now inquorate, Abdel-Fattah’s legal team at Marque Lawyers sent it a letter. It was a formal challenge to the “cultural sensitivity” grounds used to dump her, demanding her immediate reinstatement and an apology for the “malicious” characterisation of her views as a threat to community safety.

With no board left to govern and a list of boycotting authors that had swelled past 170, Adler announced her own resignation in Guardian Australia on Tuesday morning.

“I cannot be party to silencing writers,” she wrote, describing the board’s capitulation as a “terminal betrayal” of the festival’s mandate. She noted that the pressure to self-censor had made her position “utterly untenable”.

By the end of the day, the Adelaide Festival Corporation had pulled the plug. The 2026 writers’ week was over before it began. A new skeleton board was announced, somewhat ironically including one of the board’s fiercest critics – Brookman, who had initiated the directors’ petition.

The Bondi analogy

Standing amid the wreckage on Tuesday, the premier emerged to deliver the now-notorious “Bondi analogy”.

Seeking to justify the exclusion of Abdel-Fattah, Malinauskas asked the media pack: “Can you imagine if a far-right Zionist walked into a Sydney mosque and murdered 15 people? Can you imagine that as the premier of this state, I would actively support a far-right Zionist going to writers’ week and speaking hateful rhetoric towards Islamic people? Of course I wouldn’t, but the reverse has happened in this instance.”

By Wednesday morning, as the festival corporation emailing patrons promising refunds for the few ticketed events AWW has each year, another letter from Marque was fired off.

Signed by the firm’s managing partner, Michael Bradley – who is also representing the pianist Jayson Gillham in his discrimination case against the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra – it was a show cause notice to the premier himself over alleged defamation.

On Instagram, Abdel-Fattah accused Malinauskas of going even further than previous statements supporting her removal from the festival by linking her to the Bondi atrocity and suggesting, by way of analogy, that she was “an extremist terrorist sympathiser”.

The new board met twice the day after it was formed. Led by Judy Potter, a veteran arts administrator and go-to institutional fixer for the SA government, it voted to publicly apologise to Abdel-Fattah and promise her a gig at next year’s AWW.

As for this year’s event, members deemed it “tragically irretrievable”.

The academic in the eye of the storm accepted the apology wholeheartedly. But Abdel-Fattah isn’t finished with the premier.

“There is an extraordinary imbalance and abuse of power here,” she said, adding: “I’m fed up with the vicious bullying and lies about me.”

When asked if he had gone too far with his Bondi remarks, the premier remained unrepentant: “My only motivation has come from a place of a desire for people to treat each other civilly with compassion, in the interest of humanity more broadly,” he said.

That such concern for humanity has resulted in the institutional silencing of one of the country’s premier platforms for intellectual discourse suggests a new, more cautious era for a state that, since the high-water days of the Don Dunstan era, has prided itself on leading Australia in all that is radical and provocative.

The city of churches, it seems, has proven to be no sanctuary for free speech or difficult ideas. Instead, it has become a place where the rowdy pursuit of social cohesion has ended in the absolute quiet of a cancelled festival.

• This story was updated on 16 January 2025 to remove a reference to the Adelaide Festival Centre, which is not affiliated with the Adelaide Festival.