We finalise this edition from the still-clearing rubble of the latest literary scandal. The recent farce of the Bendigo Writers’ Festival — in which, if you’ve been living blissfully under some rock, speakers were sent an eleventh hour ‘code of conduct’ forbidding discussion of sensitive or divisive topics supposedly unfit for delicate Bendigoeans — further demonstrates the susceptibility of the right to safety to misuse by disingenuous actors. Is this concept itself a flawed or limited instrument when it comes to demarcating difficult speech from hate speech? Possibly, but any code is only as good as the integrity of the community that wields it, and it was bracing to see how weary everyone else has also gotten of this kind of cynical bullshit.

It’s easy to ironize another self-absorbed literary spat, but of course, the story is Gaza, not Bendigo. The story is the Palestinians who continue to speak despite these organised attempts to undermine and erase. If we struggle to conceptualise the relationship between speech and action, symbolic and material resistance, the efforts of others to silence and stymy make it clear that there are forces at work that don’t. The Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism, whose lobbying to eradicate Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from literary and academic discourse kicked off this shambolic attempt to risk-manage truth in a genocide, is not unfamiliar to this journal. Many of the contributors to its sole publication, a much-critiqued account of supposedly antisemitic incidents on university campuses since October 7, had plenty to say about your humble editors in a certain groupchat what feels like a thousand years ago.

Our grievances and discomforts from that time are so small, so meaningless when we consider the scale of violence that continues to roll on. As we write, at least 180 Palestinian media workers have been killed by Israeli forces. Is that the kind of truth AAAAA wants to silence? The story they thought Australian audiences shouldn’t hear?

In rage, in solidarity, and without a code of conduct,

Jonathan and Evelyn