By Peter Mousaferiadis
Adelaide Writers’ Week is Australia’s premier writers’ festival. The immediate debates in the wake of the Adelaide Festival Board’s decision to remove Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 Adelaide Writers’ Week program, the subsequent resignations from the board, including its director, Louise Adler, the withdrawal of about 180 writers, and now the cancellation of the event, have focused on procedure, on who said what, and on whether particular decisions constituted censorship or responsible governance.
Those details matter. But they are not, in my view, the core issue, which invites a deeper question: can our cultural institutions navigate complexity without imploding under moral pressure?
In a globalised world facing multiple crises, what’s being tested in such crises is not free speech so much as our collective capacity for consistency, judgment, integrity and inclusivity.
I come to this question as cultural entrepreneur and Secretariat for the Civil Society Observers of UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In the forums I attend, across regions and cultures, one theme returns relentlessly: the protection of minority groups. It is a foundational principle, and yet one that is constantly debated.
How do we protect minorities without flattening difference? How do we safeguard expression without converting protection into a blunt instrument? How do we avoid confusing safety with silence? How can we engage with the complexities of difference to better protect and celebrate the full diversity of cultural expressions?
These tensions are not abstract but playing out in real time within our cultural institutions.
Ancient Greek mythology explored complexity in ways that continue to engage through their depth and universal relevance. Walking the ruins of the Minoan palace at Knossos where King Minos commissioned a maze to retain his Minotaur son, you sense the mysterious, twisting corridors in ruins that still seem to embody secrets, power and ritual.
The myth of Ariadne endures because it captures the human capacity to think our way through dangerous situations and employ simple non-violent solutions cleverly. The Minotaur was fearsome, but it was the maze that doomed people. Those who entered it without guidance were lost before they encountered the beast. Ariadne’s gift to Theseus was not a weapon, but a thread: a means of orientation, to move through complexity without becoming trapped by it.
In our increasingly fractured world, shaped by overlapping conditions, including war, displacement, polarisation, climate stress, and a global media environment that rewards certainty over judgement, the maze and the Minotaur remain painfully relevant metaphors. What seems absent is the thread.
The Minotaur is not a single ideology or group but the erosion of trust, the flattening of nuance, and the replacement of judgment with moral absolutism. It is the belief that complexity itself is suspect, and that disagreement is a form of harm.
We see this in how debates escalate into demands for alignment rather than invitations to dialogue. We see it in how cultural institutions are asked to adjudicate moral purity rather than host inquiry. We see it in how minority protection, a value many of us hold sincerely, becomes entangled with selective enforcement and inconsistency.
As with the Khaled Sabsabi debacle, the events surrounding Adelaide Writers’ Week illustrate this clearly. Randa Abdel-Fattah’s removal from the program, whatever one’s view of it, became a flashpoint. The response, resignations, withdrawals and public condemnation, suggests that the maze is closing in. What might have been a difficult but navigable conversation instead became an institutional rupture.
The maze and the Minotaur defeat us. Not because anyone lacks conviction, but because they lost orientation. Pressure replaced judgement.
Ariadne’s thread represents something quieter and far harder to sustain: consistency, proportionality, and the willingness to stay oriented when emotions run high. It does not tell us what to think. It shows us how to move through the maze without becoming lost or destructive.
The arts have historically been one of humanity’s ways of preserving that thread. Through storytelling, music, theatre, and literature, societies have returned again and again to difficult questions, power, violence, betrayal, loyalty, without resolving them through force. These myths were re-imagined through drama precisely because art allows us to hold contradiction without collapsing into it. It can provide different and new perspectives that challenge our beliefs. It can lead us into and out of deeper parts of the maze to enrich our thinking and help us cope with ambivalence and paradox.
Opera understands this well. It holds love and cruelty, heroism and failure, side by side. It does not demand moral purity from its characters. It asks us to listen, to feel, and to reflect before we judge.
This is what cultural spaces still offer, if we allow them to.
Dialogue matters. Not as a buzzword, but as a discipline. Dialogue centred in kindness does not mean the absence of conviction. It means resisting the temptation to weaponise conviction against others. It means recognising that orientation is more valuable than certainty when navigating a maze.
Reflection is not silence. Hesitation is not indifference. And refusing moral coercion is not a refusal to care. In fact, it is precisely because we care about culture, minorities and the health of our institutions that it makes sense to cherish the thread.
If the arts can’t be a safe haven for exploring difficult issues, we lose one of the few spaces capable of holding all our contradictions and incongruencies. Removing hate is our generational responsibility. What role can the arts play in this while still acknowledging the value of difference? For we are and never will be faultless. The arts is a place to bring communities together, with decency and humility and in a world rapidly change, imperfections is something that makes us truly human. We just need to recognise it.
Without Ariadne’s thread, we are left wandering the maze alone and in fear while the minotaur rages at the slightest provocation. That is the true defeat.
