This is a published extract from Heresies: Occasional Pieces by Richard Flanagan, available 4 August 2026 from Penguin Books.

Many years ago I was a guest at a Slovenian writers festival that culminated in readings in a karst limestone cave. In a remarkable natural amphitheatre there had assembled a large crowd. Many came from local villages and had brought their children along. Several writers read; the last Slovenia’s most revered poet. A short man with a white beard, he somehow filled the vast space and commanded attention.

Bard-like, he recited in Slovene from memory, his voice sonorous, his rhythm musical, more incantation than reading. It was an extraordinary performance. It became apparent that the large crowd was there to hear him and really only him, their Homer. I understood not a word he said but with that crowd felt everything.

The corollary of this experience is Robert Frost’s icy observation that hell is a half-filled auditorium. I was honoured in 2021 to be asked to give the US PEN Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture in New York; less thrilled when as COVID continued to hold us all in varying states of confinement it became clear that I would not be able to give the lecture in person but would have to do it online, beamed from my Tasmanian home to the US. Speaking to a screen on a wintry night is several miles beyond hell. For there is in the strange comity of speaker and a live crowd something that goes to the heart of writing, which, after all, begins in song and chorus. Words have meaning with an audience, while without them all speech is no more than cold draughts, brief breaths here and then gone. And that night I had only the eerie pixelated silence of my laptop, and thinking of how even Homer telling of brave Odysseus’s return to Ithaca might have faltered at such a pass, I was condemned once more to talk into what felt the growing void.

 – 

It is strange to have as my subject ‘freedom to write’, coming from an island which, for a quarter of its modern history, was a slave society. Though there were major differences, the literature of the era abounds with comparisons between the convict society of Van Diemen’s Land and the slave societies of the Americas.

My forebears were transported as convicts from Ireland, frequently in the same ships and similar conditions to those which transported Africans into American slavery, now plying the same trade with a different-coloured cargo and a new destination, where many of the same practices and even administrators of Caribbean slave colonies were deployed.

My island’s founding stigmata has a second wound: the near successful genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population. To this day most Tasmanians are the descendants of the survivors of this twin trauma.

With Conradian exactitude, the war was called at the time a war of extermination. And this exter-mination, as many noted then and later, extended to others—the Tasmanian emu, the Tasmanian tiger—as if it were necessary that some universe of wonder had to be obliterated to cloak the crime. And with it memory was to be extirpated, enforced by silence. Things became unsayable, so many things.

It may be as a species we are defined by our ability to forget, yet freedom exists only in the space of memory.

I was born less than a mile from the plantation my great-great grandfather was sent to work on as a convict labourer. Freedom to write was at the first step a freedom to think, to conceive of oneself as a free being, a thought over a century in forming. The freedom to write is the freedom to say the unsayable; and to say it I had to squeeze the convict blood out of myself drop by drop, word by sentence by book.

In imagining how to do that it was often to African-American writers like Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Toni Morrison I turned. I discovered my island in their world, I discovered I belonged both to my small island and to the universe of literature, and I learnt that I could not deny either without denying myself.

To write I had to be free and to be free I had to write. That, for a writer, is the task, the only task.

To be free.

A writer’s freedom is challenged by many things. In my country of Australia the state has ever more repressive laws that significantly encroach on freedom of speech, while as our society grows more unequal the richest and most powerful have the money to leverage grotesque libel laws to silence.

In my country today the practice of journalism is chilled by such acts as our attorney-general suing a reporter and our public broadcaster, when they alleged the anal rape of a minor by a senior unnamed politi-cian. The attorney-general self-identified as the alleged rapist and on that basis instigated his legal action, which experts say has a good chance of success.

But I want to talk today about another aspect of a writer’s freedom.

We are confronted with the title of this lecture by a question masquerading as an unremarkable truth. The freedom to write—but to write what? Because what is at stake—what is always at stake—is finally not being free to write but being free to write the unsayable, the thing not allowed to be said, to tear aside the shrouds of power and wealth and their accompanying conventions and orthodoxies to describe what is.

Because in most places at most times, writers are free to write. We should not forget that tyrannies frequently reserve a higher, more privileged place for writers than democracies, a velvet prison that writers, for the most part, are happy to inhabit.

They are free to write anything they like, as long as what they like to write is what power wants written, and it contents itself with saying the sayable.

And therein lies the rub.

Of the many pernicious fictions writers retail to themselves and, given the chance, to others, perhaps the most ludicrous is that writers wish to write the truth.

Of course nothing is further from the truth than this lie.

Encrusting the lie are comforting nonsenses. One of which writers are fond is that the truth carries all before it. But truth mostly serves only to carry the truth-teller to the abyss personally—and quickly.

Much as they may pretend otherwise, writers, as a rule, are not such fools as to not know this.

The fatal problem of Camus’ Meursault in The Outsider isn’t that he killed another man but that having killed another man he can’t lie about his reasons why—and so he is executed. For telling the truth. This is both moving and comic and therefore deeply moving. It is also profoundly unrealistic.

We all lie about our reasons in order that we might live, and, when the going gets rough, writers and artists generally roll over more quickly than most. William Hazlitt once observed that for every tyrant born so too are a thousand men willing to be enslaved. We might add that of that thousand, a disproportionate number will always be the artists and writers.

And how can it be otherwise? Each of our lives is a war between, on the one hand our need to conform so that we might have shelter, food and security, and on the other the desire of our soul to be free. We understand both are necessary to us but frequently also irreconcilable. Our lives are a walk through the rubble that results, our character the map of our journey.

Another illusion writers have is that they are the voice of their people. This idea has a long history, given glorious tongue by Shelley with his injunction that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. A hundred years later, as nationalism became the new social organising principle, beckoning in a century of horror, Shelley’s post-French Revolution global hopes had somewhat narrowed to Joyce’s declaration that he would ‘forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race’.

Such monomania hides hubris: the unacknowledged legislator ends up purchased by power’s lobbyist while what emerges from the smithy is too often ideology’s apologist.

And for that reason artists and writers are mostly not their people’s heroes or heroines. Mostly they rub along with whatever is the new order, free to write as long as they write in certain ways about certain things. If you’re seeking direction in a corrupted society, the hairdresser and plumber are more likely to serve as moral exemplars than the novelist and playwright.

Klaus Mann, who in 1936 published Mephisto, an instructive novel on this theme, observed a few years earlier as the Nazis’ rise to power became irresistible, how many intellectuals and artists were crossing over to the Nazi side, not because they were sympathetic to the movement, but because that’s where the energy and the future were.

In an essay written in 1999, Roberto Bolaño describes how in Pinochet’s Chile, a young woman with literary ambitions, and her American husband, who worked for the Chilean secret police and perhaps the CIA, had a large house in which upstairs she held literary soirees and downstairs he tortured political prisoners. Bolaño wonders if the writers ‘remember the annoyance of the flickering current that made lamps blink and music stop, interrupting the dancing. Just as surely, they knew nothing about the parallel dance, in which the jab of the prod tensed the tortured back of a knee in a voltaic arc.’

And this, concludes, Bolaño, is how the literature of every country is built.

The word literature—which with Bolaño always carried an ambiguous, even pejorative sense—here means writing that supports the parallel dance of horror, the literature that doesn’t question, the literature of accepted orthodoxies.

In America you have your parallel dancers, as we do in Australia—the Aboriginal people who die in overwhelming numbers in custody, the refugees who we incarcerated in theatres of cruelty on remote Pacific islands. But acknowledging the parallel dancers does not mean immediately writing only about them, for them, of them. To oppose the parallel dance is to oppose the orthodoxies of the age. It is the freedom to write not what we are told but what we experience, and in that realm of experience must be the imagination and its capacious inventions. There must be fancy, the experi-ence that is not authenticated in or by experience. There must be the tearing down of the border walls between I and you, me and us, a breach in the razor wire that separates one soul from the next.

PEN’s noble, necessary work over the best part of a century has been to battle the external constraints that stop a writer writing—and, worse, that imprison and kill writers for what they have written and may yet write.

But we live in a new age.

We need to recognise new forms and new ways of censorship. The inner freedom to write what you think and what you feel, what you know and what you experience, is always hard and is frequently the most difficult battle. But it grows harder.

We live once more in censoring times and what is confusing is that the new censors are not the state or state bodies. They are us.

In the wake of 1989, we wrongly believed that material progress and human freedom were twins, that the former necessarily led to the latter. But as China so stunningly shows, you can have ever more material progress and ever less freedom. And we were blind to the erosion of our own freedom that our material progress and technological triumphs brought in their wake.

For a few short decades we in the west thought we could now expect no censorship. But as we grew more unequal, as we found it within ourselves to see torture as acceptable, the persecution of refugees as necessary, that silence was a precondition of tolerance, we could not see that a corrosion of something fundamental was taking place.

What is acceptable now is not ordered but understood, conveyed by the nuance of new social proscriptions, enforced by a roll call of new profanities, new obscenities, new urgencies, new blasphemies, which we absorb as if by osmosis and call common sense, decency, respect, responsibility.

Writing, though, should never pretend to respect or responsibility. Ever since the man from La Mancha put a toilet bowl on his head and strode out into the world in emulation of higher things, great literature has not been serious about the pieties and verities of its age. It has confronted cant and dogma with the absurdity of existence and laughed, questioning and upending them. Posterity, the blindest of fools, condescends to all who have gone before. Yet Cervantes, like Voltaire, laughed at religious faith and mocked rigidly held beliefs.

Do we?

The new proscriptions arise out of important and necessary social struggles. But in prosecuting causes and politics, writers are sometimes told to stay in their lanes. Writers who offer nuanced positions are attacked as the enemy they are not. Those who fail to observe the new road rules suffer opprobrium, shaming, and sometimes are called on to publicly repent.

Of course, we have always wanted work that flatters our own stupidities. But this human weakness is vastly amplified and empowered by new technologies that are, in the final instance, unaccountable except to the profit and loss spreadsheets of the richest and most powerful corporations in human history.

Many writers are, of course, happy to conform, and in conforming condemn those who won’t conform. They ‘would’, as Seamus Heaney had it about one of his millennia-old bog people, connive/ in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge.

This too is deeply human.

And yet the exact and tribal, intimate revenge turbocharged by the algorithms of greed should not determine the fate of writers, nor should they be the metric by which writing is judged or created.

A deeper damage is to the idea of writing itself—its capacity and desire for necessary invention, for the necessity of story and fancy, of its ability to encompass worlds to which neither the writer nor reader belong, and yet to which they find themselves profoundly joined.

In this sense the freedom to write is finally not so much a battle with the external forces but with the internal. It becomes a question of what was once called character, or the soul. It would not be presumptuous to call it a spiritual battle.

And in that battle it constantly comes up against the dogmas of conformity.

It is no revelation that nationalism led to many of the great disasters of the twentieth century—and not just in literature. Before the Balkan wars, the Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun famously wrote, ‘I got tired of my tribe / and moved out.’ These days, though, writers once again search for a tribe to move in with, as they once did with religion, and then empires, and then nations, and now identity.

This change has deep and profound historical roots and consequences, perhaps the least—but for us the most—that of the great national novel giving way to the great identity novel. But if the tribes change, all tribes still finally demand tribal allegiances to belief and dogma that can leave a writer unfree to write what they believe.

Šalamun’s point of view was, of course, doubly heretical, speaking out against both nationalism and the ruling Titoist ideology of his day.

But it wasn’t without antecedent.

In post-revolutionary Russia, in 1921, the first book to be banned in a pique of tribal dogma was Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the ur-novel, from Orwell’s 1984 on, for all the dystopias that followed and now litter bookshops. Before he had started We Zamyatin observed, ‘He who has found his ideal today is, like Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt and does not move ahead. The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy.’

The fate of heretics is not, however, an easy one, as Zamyatin recognised two years after We was banned: ‘Heretics,’ he wrote, ‘are justly exterminated by fire, by axes, by words . . . It is just to chop off the head of a heretical literature that challenges dogma; this literature is harmful. But harmful literature is more useful than useful literature.’

Soon all that would be possible in Russia was to dedicate oneself, as Isaac Babel, in one of his best black jokes, told the Soviet Congress of Writers in 1934, to the ‘literature of silence’.

And then head after head fell to Stalin’s bullets, the heretic Isaac Babel’s among them.

We all write in the nightmare of the dark. We cannot escape our tribal impulse, our desire to conform—for their sources lie as deep in our hearts as love and good-ness, perhaps even deeper. But a novel, when it succeeds, takes the writer beyond their own history and character, escapes the shackles of their politics and opinions, and in the alchemy of story makes of the writer’s soul that which joins one human being with all.

In the end, novels, the great subversive medium, subvert not only what society thinks is right but what the writer intends to write.

Heresy allows a writer to write freely, allows writing to be an act of joy that arises from the same deep place where laughter lives, countering the farce of dogma with the reality of life. And that joy, that laughter, that irreverence, that heretical impulse that begins with a toilet bowl astride a mad head is the only way to write when faced with even the most disturbing aspects of that reality, which today appear before us as the existential crisis of climate.

The writer’s challenge in the Anthropocene is finding a language that encompasses hope as well as grief. In meeting that challenge writing must be the rising note heard over the long silence of orthodoxy; the single, unsilenceable note that ascends.

Such language needs to encompass hope, not because of any earnest or worthy considerations, not as a morale booster in a dark time, but because as a species it is hope that propels us forward, as individuals it is hope that keeps us alive. As Primo Levi observed in Auschwitz, it was the inmates who lost hope who were not just despised but seen to have forsaken their humanity. Any literature about such darkness as the climate crisis has to admit to that most human trait of life, or it is untrue to this most fundamental truth of human beings.

Even that gloomiest of poets Philip Larkin wrote in his most enduring line, ‘What will survive of us is love’—a line he felt weak and rued writing. Perhaps for Larkin the line suggested a mawkishness or sentimen-tality. Perhaps he felt it heretical to his harder, ossified aesthetics. But the line nevertheless outlived him. If, ultimately, it is all that remains of his life’s works, what will survive of Larkin is a line that reads ‘What will survive of us is love.’

Perhaps for any of us to write of hope, to write of love, we must learn once more to be free, and to embrace heresy.

And for that to happen we must every day write ourselves out of the literature of silence.

We all come from something and, equally, need to be liberated from that same thing. That to me is the promise of literature. That I am not one. That I am not alone. That I am free.

 

Richard Flanagan presents Heresies at Festival of Dangerous Ideas on Saturday 22 August at Carriageworks, Sydney, examining how prohibitions on speaking freely put Australia at risk of becoming the country of the unsaid. Tickets on sale now.

It’s natural to seek confidence in our moral beliefs. But it’s only a short step from absolute moral certainty to intolerance and extremism.

Two and a half thousand years ago, travellers to the great temple of Apollo, home to the famous Delphic oracle, would have passed by three inscriptions engraved above its entrance. The first is one that Socrates adopted as his personal motto: “know thyself”. The second shared some oft neglected common sense: “all things in moderation”. But it’s the third that I think is most important today: “certainty leads to ruin”. 

This motto is doubly important when we think about moral certainty. While it’s natural for us to seek confidence in our moral beliefs, a surplus of certainty can drive us into toxic territory. Consider who is more dangerous: the person who has no moral compunctions at all; or the individual who has absolute moral certainty. 

The former – we might call them an ‘amoralist’ – wouldn’t care about ideas of right and wrong. They’d have no interest in the welfare of others. They might lack empathy and come across as callous or cruel. We can imagine them behaving purely in their own self-interest, even screwing other people over to benefit themselves. But it’s hard to imagine them going out of their way to punish someone if it’s not going to benefit them. 

On the other hand, the individual with absolute moral certainty – call them a ‘moral crusader’ – would be driven by their idea of right and wrong. Their moral fervour could bring them to see wrongdoers as being unrecoverably corrupted. They wouldn’t only seek to punish people who have crossed them, but anyone whom they deem to have violated their moral standards. We can imagine the moral crusader incurring a great cost to see their moral worldview realised. In the extreme, they even might be motivated kill innocent people – or themselves – to sate their moral outrage.  

The most violent extremists, terrorists, leaders of genocidal campaigns and perpetrators of acts like honour killings typically don’t lack moral fibre. In fact, it’s the opposite: they have too much. It’s precisely their sense of absolute moral certainty that makes them capable of such atrocities. 

This is something Hollywood struggles with. Many fictional villains are depicted as being narcissistic or psychopathic amoralists. But history’s (and fiction’s) greatest villains – from Hitler to Thanos – are moral crusaders, convinced of their own moral vision, and that those who oppose them are the true evildoers. 

But it’s not just extremists who are susceptible to becoming moral crusaders. The seeds of moral certainty lie within us all. And if we’re not careful, it can lead us to ruin.  

Moral colours

Say you see a youth in a hoodie knock over an old woman in a wheelchair and grab her purse. It’s likely that you’d immediately feel a strong sense of outrage. It didn’t arise because you cooly evaluated the situation, reasoned that stealing from a vulnerable person was wrong, then got outraged. In fact, the thought process is almost entirely the other way around. 

First, you see it through the lens of your moral worldview: the old woman in the wheelchair is vulnerable, the hooded youth is vicious, his act driven by greed. Those observations immediately spark outrage. It’s only then that your rational faculties kick in to render what happened in abstract terms using the language of morality, like saying “stealing from a vulnerable person is wrong”. 

Perception is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. They way you see the scene is already coloured by your moral lens. You’ve already projected your values onto what’s happening well before you’ve had a chance to think about it more deeply.  

But, in projecting our values onto the world, we’ve taken something that comes from inside of us and see as being a part of the world. It’s like when we slip from saying “I dislike broccoli” to saying “broccoli is bad”. The first is a subjective statement about our tastes; the second is an objective statement about the world. 

When we see something as being objective, we tend to think that everyone must see it in the same way. That makes it harder for us to imagine what the world looks like to someone else, such as someone who has a different set of interests or moral worldview.

One person may see a colonial era statue as representing achievement and pride; another sees it as representing injustice and shame. It also make us more likely to think that people who see things differently must be broken somehow, or that they’re morally corrupt. It’s only a short step from there to dehumanising them and robbing them of their moral status. 

In this chronically online age, we’re also under constant pressure to keep up with the litany of moral outrages that sweep social media. We’re exposed to moral crusaders touting their worldview, and many of us are quietly fearful of saying the wrong thing and attracting their – or their followers’ – ire. This drives us towards extremism and makes us less tolerant of different moral perspectives. 

Thankfully, the same mottos that guided the Greeks two and a half thousand years ago can bring wisdom to us today. “Know thyself” encourages us to understand and be critical of our own moral worldview, and appreciate that not everyone sees the world in the same way. “All things in moderation” invites us to find a middle path between the amoralist and the moral crusader (also, limit your time on social media). And “certainty leads to ruin” reminds us that it’s better to doubt something that’s true than it is to have absolute conviction in something that is false.  

Moral certainty might be natural, it might feel good, but if we don’t push back against it, it can turn us into the very monsters we ought to be battling against.

 

Explore the dangers of moral certainty in the session, Against Goodness with Jesse Bering, Joanna Bourke, Hanno Sauer and Sisonke Msimang on Sat 22 August at Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Tickets on sale now. 

When we see public figures “held to account” without mercy and by force, we can forget there are other ways to be accountable – ways that we have reason to invite.

I heard a surprising story recently. Writer Amanda Litman was telling a podcast host about how she and her husband made a New Year’s resolution to host a meal at their home every week in 2025. The surprise? They kept it. 

It was her husband’s idea, and he did the cooking. The couple made a list of virtually everyone they knew, then Litman started texting: “Hey! My husband has made a New Year’s resolution to host dinner at our home every weekend…”. 

What interested me about the couple’s approach was the fact it involved telling almost everyone they knew what they were trying to achieve. Later, I asked Litman whether having so many people watching helped them persevere. She thought it did. 

Their success got me thinking about how simply letting our friends know about a resolution we’ve made, and take an interest in the outcome, can help us to achieve it – not because they will punish us if we fail, but because they’ll want us to succeed. We might have an even greater chance of success if we ask them to hold us accountable: giving a particular person or people explicit permission to hold us to a particular goal. 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines accountability as, “an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one’s actions”. We’re familiar with scenarios where the “obligation” is imposed; where a public figure is held to account for a failing, sometimes reasonably and constructively, but often in ways that leave them shamed, not forgiven, let alone restored and reinstated. We’re also familiar with scenarios where measures intended to ensure compliance involve so much bureaucracy they foster cynicism instead of diligence, and resentment instead of trust. We’re less familiar with scenarios where it’s invited and received with “willingness”, where it rights, even prevents, a wrong. 

We are most aware of accountability when it fails, because a system that isn’t causing problems, and is preventing them, doesn’t tend to make the news. 

If accountability makes an organisation or a sector or a person less effective, or is all about exposing just how wrong a person or group was, and is, and will remain, wanting to avoid it is understandable. But there are many ways to be held to account.

Harvard Medical School psychologist Stuart Ablon laments the kind of accountability that fixates on punishment. He says the idea that “just putting up with a consequence – suffering through it ‘constitutes taking responsibility for one’s actions is’ a really lame way” to hold people accountable; and suggests the “ultimate form of taking responsibility” is keeping someone “on the hook” for solving a problem so it doesn’t keep occurring. But he doesn’t expect them to solve it alone. 

Ablon, who’s done a lot of work with misbehaving children, says it’s less a case of “people do well if they want to” than “people do well if they can” – he says the struggle often isn’t, as we presume, a lack of will, but a lack of skill. 

Rather than simply expecting punishment to discourage bad behaviour, he encourages caregivers, educators and the like to seek to understand its cause.  

Ablon’s approach involves listening and asking questions. When he does share his perspective with a patient, he uses an “and” not a “but” to add his view, instead of overriding theirs. This lays a foundation for “co-authoring” a solution together. Change that might be impossible to achieve alone, might become possible with help. 

I can see how it might be easier to accept accountability, even invite it eagerly, when the one doing the “holding” is coming alongside you with understanding, versus policing or surveilling with suspicion. If my conscience is engaged, and I’m aiming to not only avoid negative consequences or meet minimum standards, but be the best employee, colleague, partner, parent – “moral agent” – I can be; if I feel safe as well as vulnerable, it could be more effective still. 

I’m struck by the many forms accountability might take. The Litmans didn’t seek or sanction it per se, but their openness was a step towards it. Colleagues signing up for “Dry July” might step into it, resolving to help each other stay the course. In the case of addiction, a blend of the relational and institutional might be best: a sponsor who has been there themselves, and been trained to support others.  

There’s a place for relational as well as institutional, invited as well as imposed, accountability. 

A CEO might experience accountability via a board that acts on stakeholders’ behalf, and asks hard questions with good reason. Those questions might push admissions and course-corrections that keep the organisation – and the CEO – on track. That same CEO, knowing a tendency to prioritise their career destroyed a previous marriage, might seek personal accountability too. Upon entering a new relationship, they might authorise a friend to ask them the hard questions – even monitor their calendar – to reduce risk.  

We can try to meet professional standards, break addiction and achieve personal goals on our own. We can avoid difficult, uncomfortable, confronting conversations in the process. But if we refuse to admit we’re fallible, if we refuse to admit we could use help, we deprive ourselves of valuable support. In doing so we make ourselves more vulnerable, not less.

Similarly, if we refuse to hold others accountable, to take some responsibility for keeping those we live with or work with on track, we might deprive them of guidance and support. That’s not to say there wouldn’t be some relationships where agreeing to hold a person accountable might not be wise or appropriate, but I think it’s safe to assume that for most of us, blanket avoidance is not the most caring default. 

Philosopher C. Stephen Evans, who’s explored the history of accountability in multiple cultures and eras, says humans are social beings, and accountability is fundamentally a social notion. He says most people think of humans as being “morally accountable” on some level, and considers accountability a relational “virtue”.  

Courting accountability strikes me as particularly virtuous when the desire reflects a recognition of what we owe each other; and the desire flows from wanting to be a better person – as opposed to, say, a hotter one. 

Perhaps some who have faced a painful, public reckoning could have avoided it by authorising a partner, friend or colleague to hold them accountable to certain values or standards or goals. Perhaps they could have righted a troubling course of action before it led to an explosive transgression.  

Of course, every form of accountability can be corrupted and derailed. The fact we see box-ticking hamstring good intentions, and people failing to speak up when they should because they’re too close to a person, or too afraid of them; doesn’t mean we’re better off without it. It only confirms how much we need it. 

We can’t rely on personal accountability alone – sometimes those closest to a person or group are the last to call them out. But we can’t discount the benefits.  

We humans are very good at making excuses for our failings; we’re not so good at taking responsibility for them. I know this from experience. But the path of least resistance is rarely the best one. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to living up to my values and ideals, when it comes to ditching bad habits, and sustaining good ones, I need all the help I can get. 

The world is awash with dangerous ideas. But most of them are not worth your time.

Some ideas are made to look dangerous so they can ride the algorithm to the top of your feed on a wave of outrage. Others present themselves as daring and subversive while repackaging old certainties that no longer fit the world we live in. Some are dangerous because they tempt us with easy answers while steering us away from complexity. Others are labelled dangerous simply because someone insists we should not hear them. 

This is not the kind of danger that the Festival of Dangerous Ideas is interested in. 

Some people expect the Festival to program the loudest voices from the furthest fringes of politics or culture. Outrage certainly attracts attention. But we do not seek controversy for its own sake. We do not program speakers because they are shocking, provocative or merely contrarian. 

From our perspective, real danger means something else. 

We live in a world that is changing faster than ever before. It is a world of overlapping crises, competing truths and profound uncertainty. The issues that matter most are rarely simple. The forces shaping our lives are increasingly global, interconnected and difficult to see. 

No individual can fully grasp them all. 

We depend on experts to help us understand the world. Yet in an age of social media and infinite information, expertise itself has become contested. The democratisation of information has not necessarily made us better informed. It has often made it harder to distinguish knowledge from confidence, insight from performance, and expertise from ideology. 

Ambiguity creates another challenge. When there are gaps in our understanding, we rush to fill them. We fill them with assumptions, experiences, biases and fears. We are often more comfortable with certainty than we are with complexity. 

But certainty is not the same thing as understanding. 

To us, the real danger lies in confronting the world as it is rather than as we would like it to be. It means resisting simplistic narratives and probing beneath the surface. It means recognising that we may inhabit the same world while experiencing it in radically different ways. 

Real danger requires us to accept something many of us find uncomfortable: that no single story can explain everything.

Danger is accepting the necessity of pluralism. 

That is why the Festival brings together thinkers, writers, artists, scientists, journalists and public intellectuals who have devoted their lives to understanding the hidden forces shaping our world. Not because they all agree, but because they don’t. 

Of course, creating a space for difficult ideas is not always easy. 

There are conversations we would like to have that exceed our resources, our infrastructure or our capacity to manage the backlash they might generate. That is simply the reality of running a public festival in an age where outrage often travels further than nuance, where engagement is rewarded more than understanding, and where attention is increasingly shaped by systems that privilege conflict over depth. 

We do not pretend to be immune from those pressures. What matters is that we continue to resist them. 

Every year we ask ourselves whether it is enough to keep pushing the boundaries we can reach, even if we cannot reach every boundary we can imagine. Whether an imperfect space for difficult conversations is better than no space at all. 

Our answer remains yes. 

So we keep trying. We keep inviting people who challenge our assumptions. We keep trusting audiences to engage with complexity. And we keep making the case that understanding is more valuable than outrage. 

We know our audience are capable of leaning into ideas that might seem too dangerous, or perhaps too safe, on the surface, but which have the potential to fundamentally change how we see the world. 

None of us have time for fake danger. The stakes are too high. 

What the Festival offers is something rarer: the opportunity to sit with uncertainty, to encounter ideas that resist easy answers, and to uncover the forces shaping our world that too often remain hidden beneath the surface. 

The most dangerous ideas are not always the loudest, nor are they necessarily the ones that shock us. Often they are the ones that reveal what was hiding in plain sight all along: truths about our societies, our institutions and ourselves that we would rather not confront. 

The most dangerous ideas are not the ones that offend us – it’s the ones we are wilfully ignoring. 

 

Festival of Dangerous Ideas returns 20-30 August 2026 across Sydney. Full program announcement coming soon. Subscribe for updates.

There is a reason why the topic of ethics has been of enduring importance for thousands of years. It is not simply that it represents humanity’s best attempt to define what makes for a good life. Beyond that, ethics is based on a deep understanding of how human agency shapes the world we inhabit.

This understanding begins with the recognition that nearly everything we encounter in life could have been different… but for the choices made by other people. Limited only by the laws of physics, human choice is the most powerful force on this planet. So, naturally, understanding the deep structure of human choice is of immense significance. Because only then can we really explain the world.

Ethics touches every aspect of our daily lives. Understanding this is especially important in times of profound and unsettling change; such as we experience today. At the global level, we are confronted by increasing geopolitical instability, threats to social cohesion and deep uncertainty about whether powerful technologies, like AI, will be a blessing or a curse for humanity. These larger forces ultimately translate into the ‘bread and butter’ issues of daily life – job security, access to affordable health care, housing and energy… the thousands of variables that affect us for better or for worse. Many of those issues coalesce in concerns about the kind of world that will be inherited by our children and unborn future generations. In essence, will Australia realise its potential to be a secure, just and prosperous nation or, will we elect to be something less than we might have been – if only we had chosen more wisely?

The Ethics Centre has a vision for the kind of world we hope to support. Our initiatives which include developing critical thinking skills in young Australians through our education programs, strengthening social cohesion through live events such as Festival of Dangerous ideas, creating decision making frameworks for businesses, and providing free, accessible ethics counselling help support a world in which “privilege has been tempered by fairness; in which power has been checked by conscience; in which good and right prevail – for the benefit of all”. This might seem a little ‘abstract’ or, perhaps, naïve. But one needs only to look at the state of the world to see how different things could be if such an ideal was given practical effect.

We reject the idea that it is ‘naïve’ to hope for something better. In fact, we positively embrace this possibility. We place the emphasis on being ‘better’ – not perfect, just better. We choose ‘better’ because ‘better’ is possible. It is within the reach of every person’s grasp. No matter how small the choice we make, the collective impact can be colossal.

So, what does it mean to ‘choose better’? It might be a word of thanks to someone who assists you. It could be found in a morning greeting to the person who sits next to you on the bus. It might be the willingness to pay a few cents more for the eggs laid by free-range chooks. It could be checking in with someone who appears to be distressed. It could be ‘playing fair’ rather than by exploiting a loophole in the rules of the game. The list of possibilities is endless. That is, ‘better’ need not involve grand gestures and inspiring acts of heroism. So, this is not an agenda for those privileged by wealth, power or opportunity. Yes, the relatively powerful have the capacity to make a larger contribution to the greater good. But we are all equal in being able to do something – proportional to our capacity – to make a positive difference to the world.

We need to hold firm to this truth – and reject any suggestion that our efforts to be and do better are futile.

As you go about your life, I would invite you to pause and look around at the world that surrounds you… and wonder. How did the familiar landscape come to be the way it is? How different might the built environment have been but for the choices made? What drove those choices? What values and principles are embedded in the physical forms you encounter? Are the institutions you rely upon realising or betraying their purposes? What lies behind the actions of the people with whom you meet and interact? What is driving the behaviour you observe and experience?

There are plenty of things to be concerned about in the world – many good causes deserving our support. Homelessness, disadvantage, discrimination and other forms of injustice… these are just some of the ills that trouble society. All are the symptoms of ethical failure. Like any symptom, each must be attended to. But if we care equally about prevention, rather than cure alone, then it is essential that we invest in Australia’s ‘ethical infrastructure’. That is the essence of The Ethics Centre’s appeal for ongoing support – an appeal that asks us to invest in the deep structures that determine the contours of our lives. We thank everyone who supports this work; for choosing to make a better world.

The Ethics Centre equips Australians with the practical tools to navigate a complex world. Help us continue our work by making a tax-deductible donation to our Annual Appeal before 30 June. 

As a writer and reader, I am unequivocally conscious of the blatant lack of cultural representation evident in the art I consume.

Historical power dynamics, not limited to patriarchy and white supremacy, have catalysed a passive acceptance for this inequality by engraining prejudice into Western society and culture. This results in those who are otherwise supportive of diversity remaining acquiescent, and others believing that such discrimination is unproblematic. While this inequity is reflected in the literary world, storytelling has historically acted as a medium to expose injustice and advocate for marginalised communities. Yet power structures supporting mainstream groups ensures that many such texts remain difficult to obtain and lack recognition in contemporary society.  

I am embarrassed to admit that the first book I read by a culturally diverse woman was this year, partly due to my own fault of not seeking out such an author sooner. But more significantly due to the fact that I was never exposed to such authors – their stories not often easily accessible. This seems to be the norm in Western societies, and the comfortable bubble created by and for cultural majorities makes it difficult for diversity to be considered in mainstream literature.  

As writer Magdalene Abraha notes, authors who have fractured through this bubble encounter alternative obstacles, often feeling pressured to write on topics of race, discrimination, and gender, or ‘write what you know’. She goes on to identify how authors have been rejected on the merits that their books aren’t representative enough of these topics. However, it is not the responsibility of culturally diverse women to educate others on the reality of race, gender, and discrimination. This underlying expectation limits them by their identity rather than their creativity, contrasting with the artistic freedom that white male authors enjoy.  

The alternative side to this concept is that stories that do explore discrimination, race, and the identities of culturally diverse women are often seen as being political texts. So much so that many stories, like The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas, have been banned due to ‘heavy content’, where this ‘heavy content’ is an accurate representation of reality for a cultural minority.  

Cynthia Robinson Young, another woman and author of colour, states that “…pretty much everything I write is political. It isn’t intentional. I thought it was life”, for even in the mindset of contemporary society, cultural representation is viewed as a challenge against white supremacy. As a young writer this is an odd and somewhat unsettling concept to comprehend, that my own story should be considered inherently political.  

The paradoxical nature of the literary world offers the illusion of cultural celebration, advocating that ethnically diverse authors are free to write their truths and pour their culture onto the page. Many bookstores now have a special category dedicated to culturally diverse authors, protagonists are more diversified, stories are more subjective, and social media trends offer recommendations to diversify one’s bookshelf, a collection of the same popular books recycled by different content creators. Although, I fear that this is just a trendy facade.  

For how many culturally diverse women can create without their gender or ethnicity interfering with their writing, book sales, promotions, and overall ability to become published in the first place? It is a cage masked by the title ‘freedom’.  

Editor Seema Mahaniam highlights how systematic oppression of culturally diverse women still exists in the literary world. They are not granted the same opportunities as white authors and should their debut novel fail to meet advancements, it is viewed as a reflection of all ethnic authors. As a culturally diverse woman, I can’t help but feel a sense of bitterness to this knowledge. Why is it that in contemporary society, in a world where equality and diversity is spoken about at nearly every corner, my identity should still be seen as a barrier?  

“Literary agents say that publishers’ appetite for books that examine race and racism has dwindled… the literary landscape still skews heavily toward white writers.”

The movement for cultural inclusion has been ongoing for decades, and statical evidence indicates that little change has been made despite recent advertisements of cultural inclusion. The 2014 hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks and 2020’s #PublishingPaidMe revealed an alarming discrepancy between the book sales and advancements for white and culturally diverse authors. A 2018 study by The First Nations and People of Colour Writers Count indicated that of 1000 Australian books only 1% were by First Nation authors and 7% by culturally diverse authors. In 2023, Lee & Low released a report indicating that white employees overwhelmed their publishing workforce, totalling 72.5%. Such statistical evidence reveals the reality of cultural diversity in literature; that is to say, it’s fictitious.  

Of course, ethnic representation in stories is significant to offer culturally diverse readers the opportunity to feel a sense of empowerment within self-identity and culture. However, I never found myself bothered by this as a child. I loved stories purely for what they offered a shy and somewhat lonely little girl. Magic, escapism from the racism battled in school, and a sense of wonder in a not-so-wonderful world.  

It was normal that all authors were white, as were most characters, and therefore I didn’t question it. Rather, I sought connections with characters via their personalities, and it wasn’t until I read Zoya Patel’s Reflections on Representation that I realised how common this experience is for many culturally diverse readers. Through analysis of her personal experience and literary ethics, she explores how cultural representation in literature presents an opportunity for readers from cultural majorities to engage with diversity by understanding the perspectives, struggles, and morals of characters who depict ethnic minorities. Our shared experience indicates that culturally diverse women have fostered an ability to seek self-representation in literature regardless of cultural divergences. Empathising with human experience is not limited by ethnicity, culture, or gender identity and is something any reader can achieve. In reflection of this concept, I hope that the rationing of culturally diverse women is removed with the continuous challenging of white supremacy standards.   

Storytelling holds the capability to offer avenues of understanding and compassion, promoting equality while exposing the realities of ethnic and gender diversity for many writers. Literature, like all art, is reflective of our world and thus should accurately communicate this diversity through both art and artist. As a writer and reader, I hope for the day when books by culturally diverse women may sit on a bookshelf, alongside other works, without the need for justification or the labelling of their divergence.  

 

A Cage Called Freedom: Cultural Diversity in Contemporary Literature by Sheona Tattersall is one of the Highly Commended essays in our Young Writers’ 2025 Competition. Find out more about the competition here.