A storm smashed into the Byron Writers Festival site a night before the opening last week, shredding two marquees and flooding the beachside lawns of the well-named Elements of Byron Resort. Next morning the organisers thought they would have to cancel. Nature played a mean trick on director Edwina Johnson and retiring chair and founder Chris Hanley in the festival's 20th year. However, staff, volunteers and local companies laboured all day to erect new marquees, pump water and lay gravel, and as sessions began we would never have known. An outstanding program with 150 writers resulted in a 14 per cent rise in box office takings and a record 70,000 attendances over three days by more than 3000 visitors, many in new gumboots. (Veterans of the 2008 festival flood, like me, brought our own gumboots).

Politics pulled big crowds, with American political satirist P.J. O'Rourke butting heads with Kerry O'Brien and causing a walk-out of women when he personally criticised Hillary Clinton. Stan Grant made people cry (again) with his passionate Thea Astley Address about James Baldwin's book Go Tell It on the Mountain. Michael Leunig drew the evolution of Mr Curly and talked about his epiphany after a near-death bang on the head. Memoir shone: there was laughter as Richard Glover, Magda Szubanski and Rosie Waterland spoke about their difficult childhoods; when Elspeth Muir, Luke Williams and Liam Pieper discussed addiction, Wendy Whiteley rose from the audience to warn against glorifying drugs as a gateway into creativity; she and co-author Janet Hawley spoke about their book on her beautiful public garden, which has been protected by the NSW government but awaits a trust to maintain it.

Important conversations were had on- and offstage, and though it rained all weekend we hardly noticed. The festival bestsellers were Szubanski's Reckoning, Penguin Bloom by Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive, Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, Good Muslim Boy by Osamah Sami, Glover's Flesh Wounds and The Turner House by Angela Tournoy.

POSTCARDS FROM THE PAST

A beautiful package arrived from Text Publishing this week. In it was a small yellow flip-lidded box containing 100 postcards decorated with the covers of the first 100 books in the Text Classics series, all cleverly designed in black and yellow by W.H. Chong. Among them are reissues of works (many previously out of print) by forgotten and well-known authors such as Marcus Clarke, Randolph Stow, Elizabeth Harrower, David Ireland, Kate Grenville, Barbara Baynton and Glenda Adams (I wrote the introduction to her exquisite satire Dancing on Coral).

Also in the package was the 100th classic, The Dyehouse by Mena Calthorpe – an author and a 1961 novel, both with a fascinating history, that I did not know. I am inspired by Fiona McFarlane's introduction to read the story about workers in a post-war Sydney factory (based on Calthorpe's experience and socialist politics). McFarlane bought her old copy from Gould's Book Arcade in Newtown, near the novel's setting in an industrial inner city that no longer exists. The "vivid mobility" of the characters – Miss Merton, a "precise, maiden lady, well into middle age", her co-workers, and their frightful boss – bring alive the issues of work and society. The Dyehouse and Text Classics Postcards are published in September (pre-order each for $12.95 at textpublishing.com.au).