’Tis the season for literary festivals and all things books

Two hefty blokes were outside a venue at the recent Clunes Booktown Festival. “What’s this one about?” one asked. Hear Me Roar: Fearless Female Characters in Crime, said the volunteer. Coming in? “Nah,” said the bloke, grinning. “They’ll beat me up.”

He needn’t have worried. This event had a panel of fearless women crime writers (Fiona Hardy, Vikki Petraitis, Jacqui Horwood) and one man (Adrian Hyland), but they were all non-violent. After writing true crime and seeing gruesome crime scene photographs, Petraitis said she didn’t want her fictional detective to get hurt. “So a failed police dog would come in and bite the bad guy.”

Sadly, we lost Adelaide Writers’ Week this year, but there’s no shortage of other bookish attractions. Autumn has become peak season for Australian literary festivals. Manly Writers’ Festival and Tasmania Reads were on at the same time as Clunes, and Queensland has just staged our largest children’s literature festival, Storyfest Gold Coast. In Victoria this month I’ll be going to the Sorrento Writers Festival, billed as a world-class festival in a small beachside town. Then there are the Trans Book Festival and Fitzroy Writers Festival, both in Melbourne. In May, there will be festivals in Margaret River, Bathurst, on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast and the NSW Central Coast, plus the Melbourne Writers Festival and Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Clunes Booktown is in its 20th year and has its own special character. One ingredient is the booksellers: more than 130 of them lined up in the main street of the picturesque Victorian Goldfields town, offering second hand and new titles, everything from vintage Enid Blyton to lucky-dip books wrapped in brown paper. The other ingredient is its broad appeal for locals and families: with bands playing in the pergola and kids running riot in the hay bale maze, it’s a dinkum country fair.

This year’s patron saint was veteran environmental activist Bob Brown, who drew a full house and a standing ovation. He revealed he was once a shy young student who found self-confidence in standing up to bullies and bigwigs in the corporate world. The notorious crime figure Chopper Read was once offered $500 to kill him when they were both in the same prison: “Only $500, how embarrassing!” It didn’t bother Brown, he’s had many death threats and was once shot at by a vigilante group, which was far more terrifying.

He lives by three dictums: optimism, defiance and empathy. He exhorted young people not to feel hopeless and helpless at the state of the world: “Get your degree, have fun, find good companions, be kind to others, face that nastiness with a determination to turn it round towards common sense and your own ability to change the world.”

That could be a way to live and die well, a theme at another panel. “Nobody wants to talk about death, but here you are,” said death scholar Hannah Gould, looking out at the packed Clunes Town Hall. “Looking great,” added fellow panellist, author and yoga teacher Antonia Pont. They had wise advice about grief – “you can’t do grief wrong” – and how to be a good friend to the bereaved: “Set the alarm for three months’ time, when everyone else has moved on.”

Gould cautioned against making death relentlessly positive: “I hate the fact we’re all going to die.” But there were ways to make it more bearable. You could have more individual funerals: hire a heavy metal band, throw streamers and confetti, or get your mates to carry your coffin between the goalposts so you can kick your last goal. Or you could have a dog bound up the aisle, an unscripted event during the session that got everyone laughing.