The Literature Board was asked to provide only $8,000 (as against $50,000 for Adelaide); the balance of funding came from other sources, and the day to day organisation was pretty efficient, thanks to the long-practised skill of Maureen Freer (convenor of many previous Brisbane Warana Writers’ Festivals) and the managing committee.

A test of these skills came early. It had been long rumoured that the Week would bemade a forum for protest or attack on the Queensland Government’s repressive Aboriginal Land policies. In Adelaide, Judith Wright circulated a paper urging that the conference in Brisbane be boycotted as a protest against Bjelke Petersen and his government. A few weeks before Commonwealth Writers’ Week, Kath Walker announced her withdrawal in support of Judith Wright. I had argued with Judith Wright in Adelaide that the place for exactly such a protest or demonstration was the conference itself. What value a one-inch paragraph on page 15 of the national dailies noting her protest and withdrawal? This is what, in fact happened. Kath Walker received a little more space when she pulled out, but only in the Queensland press.

By the time of the Writers’ Week itself, it was clear the issues were still there. Before even the first session, Graeme Gibson from Canada and Michael Thelwell from Jamaica, who only discovered on arrival the political ramifications of the festival, had got together and begun a draft statement from the visiting  participants on the Aboriginal Land Rights issue and their support for moves of protest. The week beforehand I had spoken with Frank Moorhouse and Judith Rodriguez about the need for a motion to be put to the conference.

Professor Ken Goodwin, of Queensland University, one of the convenors, had already made his plans and in the second session on that first day he invited Dennis Walker, Kath Walker’s son and one of the leading activists for black rights in Australia, to speak in the session ‘The Rise of Commonwealth Literature’, as an unprogrammed fourth speaker. His impassioned address, which began with messages from his mother, ended with a strong catalogue of specific injustices and an urgent exhortation that this Conference carry a resolution in support of black rights in Australia. It was a bash and brazen-it-out sort of rhetoric, designed to challenge and demonstrate urgency and purpose. Some of the genteel Queensland literary ladies blanched and were shocked. Most got the point. Dennis, impeccably dressed in navy suit and waistcoat, strode off to more active engagements closer to the action. The two already drafted papers were circulated. 

On Wednesday morning a special meeting was called at 8.30 am and the resolution, after much discussion on the minutiae of phrasing, was carried unanimously. This is the text:

We, at this meeting of Commonwealth Writers, deplore the failure to grant to Queensland Aboriginal and Torre’s Straits Islander communities freehold rights to, and secure tenure on land they now occupy and other lands suitable and adequate to the material and cultural wellbeing of these communities. And further, this meeting, in recognizing the United Nations Charter on Human Rights, supports the moves from within the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and elsewhere for a rectification of the injustice and neglect that have been imposed on the Aboriginal people of Australia, and calls upon the governments of this state and this country to recognize the urgent need to redress past wrongs and present exploitation.

This motion was carried unanimously by a meeting held on Wednesday, 29 September at 8.30 am and attended by writers from many Commonwealth countries.

Discussion then followed on when best to make the resolution public. The Friday book-launch by Senator Neville Bonner of young Aboriginal poet Lionel Fogarty’s new book from Penguin, Yoogum Yoogum, was first favoured, until it was learned that Senator Bonner would not be able to make it. The other big launch, by Bill Hayden, Leader of the Opposition, on Wednesday night (The Birthday Gift, by Tom Shapcott) was thought the item most likely to get press and radio coverage and accordingly the text was read out on that occasion, and broadcast over ABC radio that evening.

Some overseas visitors, of course, were put into a position of some embarrassment by this extracurricular activity, especially those who arrived as representatives of particular Governments and accordingly felt conscious of possible misinterpretation of any stand they, as individuals, might take. In the event, the resolution probably achieved little more than a sort of token gesture in the direction of genuine involvement. The days of the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola’s J’accuse are long past, it seems. But in terms of the conference itself, the issue raised very sharply the cultural dilemma of Australia and the important future that writing by Aboriginal Australians will undoubtedly create within the culture. No; there was no session on this theme, though Friday morning’s ‘Manifesting a People’ with Hone Tuwhare from New Zealand, Colin Johnson from Western Australia, Prithvindra Chakravarti presently of Niugini and Kumalau Tawali of Niugini, considered the spectrum of Aboriginal minorities in new English Language cultures.

Otherwise, things went on, as usual with such events: long queues of poets desperate to use up every second and, more of their allotted time whether or not anyone actually listened; playwrights grandstanding each other; novelists taking notes; professional conference-goers lining up the next venue and the next possible invitation. Everyone was delighted to find boarding school breakfasts as appalling as they remembered. Everyone smirked at the crassness of the New Brisbane, almost nobody talked about the Commonwealth Games. The nights were spiced with tropical bloom. There were badges and labels and folders of printed material. To the secret delight of all the Australian participants, there were no NAME names to have to contend with.