Trent Dalton, the bestselling author of Boy Swallows Universe, All Our Shimmering Stars and, most recently Love Stories, was thrilled to be in what he called "the second-best city in the world" at the weekend, come to address the question "What does the world need now?"
Dalton was first at City Hall on Friday evening to help open the ninth Newcastle Writers Festival with a panel of bestselling authors and thinkers including Clementine Ford, Hannah Kent, Thomas Mayor, Nardi Simpson and Jessie Stephens.
As the Festival emerged from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, which forced it to run online in 2020 and to be cancelled entirely in 2021 putting off its 10th anniversary, Festival director Rosemarie Milsom set the tone for the weekend with a call to be present - to take it all in.
"It's a really ugly place out there at the moment - I'm not denying it, and I don't want to sugar-coat it," she said in her opening remarks, "What is happening overseas, what's happening to our friends up north, is confronting. But I want you to come to the weekend and enjoy the conversation. Book people are great people. They're full of passion and big ideas, so just engage with that."
What does the world need now?
The answer of the nation's best writers was almost universal: Love. Love in all forms. Love for friends, and for ourselves. Love for our cultural heritage. Love requited. And love un-.
Love, even when it looks like grief.
As Jessie Stephens, the Sydney writer and podcaster and content head of Mamamia, put it - on crutches and wearing a moon boot on her injured right leg, sustained in a hiking fall in remote Australia three weeks earlier - love for broken things. Love that comes from heartbreak and allows for healing and acknowledging the seemingly endless adversity we have faced.
"What the world needs is to make space for broken hearts, and broken legs, and broken heads," Stephens said, "To allow for moments of wallowing.
"It is in our experiences of aloneness that we are most connected and most human. Love at times is easy. Heartbreak is a price we pay for it."
What followed was a weekend-long love letter - at times playful, at times confronting in its honesty, at times tortured - penned by the country's best writers, to the L-word itself.
As Mayor and Simpson unflinchingly addressed a deep love of country tensioned by Australia's Indigenous heritage fraught with colonial hate and violence ("Since the beginning of the European invasion ... colonial institutions have been teaching my people to hate who we are," Mayor said), and Ford penned a trademark incisive ode to unrequited affection, examined by a older and wiser self ("He was just a boy after all, neither god, nor a monster"), Dalton set his sights wide.
After reciting a litany of letters on love received in response to his latest book on Friday night, by the end of his hour-long conversation with Milsom Saturday morning the award-winning journalist turned self-confessed "sentimental writer" was on his feet leading the audience of hundreds in an impromptu rendition of the Beatles' "All You Need is Love".
Dalton's latest book collects countless love stories from strangers, which he collated over the course of months spent on a street corner in Brisbane armed with an Olivetti typewriter bequeathed to the writer after the death of a close friend.
His appearances at the Festival at the weekend were marked by similar fleeting and seemingly disconnected anecdotes that culminated to illuminate his childhood, influences, and a creative raison d'etre; asked by Milsom Saturday morning why he writes, he replied "because I'm trying to make sense of it".
The Newcastle Writers Festival concludes Sunday evening, April 3.
