Speaking at the festival, the author took aim at the event’s ‘embarrassing’ financial arrangements that come ‘straight out of the big tobacco playbook’
Tim Winton has used his closing address at Perth festival’s Writers Weekend to voice his opposition to the ongoing reliance of Western Australian arts organisations on sponsorship from the fossil fuel industry.
Taking aim specifically at Woodside Energy – which is a sponsor of one of the festival’s key events, the Saturday 5 March performance of John Luther Adams’ Pulitzer prize-winning work Become Ocean – Winton, one of Australia’s most highly recognised writers, said that the “arts-washing” fossil fuel companies continued to engage in on a major scale was “straight out of the big tobacco playbook.”
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