While the festival is not ''big ticket'', it attracted about 10,000 literary devotees this year. Many came from greater Victoria or interstate, and some from overseas, but most were locals. The speakers were an exciting menagerie of literary animals - from graphic novelists, to comedians, to bloggers and at least one philosopher. (Guilty as charged. Pass the hemlock.) And this is only one festival, in one city: there are many more, across the state and country, in cities and regional centres.

Why are literary festivals so popular? The very simple answer is this: healthy cities need writers, and writers need to meet one another, and readers. Good writers encourage the development of ideas. As theorist Walter J. Ong argued, writing was partly responsible for the rise of rational thinking in Western civilisation. While the spoken word can be nebulous and fluid, the written word is like a thing, to be examined as if from a distance. Concepts become something to contemplate and analyse.

In this way, writing promotes reflection - aesthetic, ethical, political. It is basic for healthy democratic life, which requires critical judgment: each citizen, ideally, must reflect upon the values and policies of candidates, parties and lobbies. The best writers - in books, newspapers, online - help us to think well.

As art, writing can also enrich and expand human experience. Everyday life can be vague and variable. Perception becomes dimmed, ideas hazy and emotions dulled. Art takes the water and peat of experience, and distils it: a whisky more striking, subtle or suggestive. This can open our eyes to our own psyche, but also to others'. Other genders, classes, ethnicities, eras, in all their ambiguity and ambivalence - we can see and feel as they do.

As the Queen puts it in Alan Bennett's An Uncommon Reader, ''it tenderises one''. This is important for modern Australians: having a deeper, broader sense of one another and ourselves. Less cynical anaesthesia, more raw and refined sympathy.

If writing can help readers to think and feel, literary festivals help writers to write, and readers to read. Most immediately, festivals contribute to the craft and business of writing. This is particularly so at the Emerging Writers' Festival, with its focus on emerging writers, their professional development and community profile. Tips, tricks, techniques, tropes - all vital for one's literary vocation.

It can be a morale massage and social glue: meeting fellow authors, in an often-solitary career. This can help to develop a genuine literary community, instead of a scattering of atoms with moleskines and grudges. This intimacy can also be a remedy for the detachment and disembodiment of the written word, particularly for critics: there are real beings behind bylines and book covers.

This does not mean that literary festivals are love-ins - there are some fierce arguments. And writers are often still competing: for money, recognition and achievement. But with a little more intimacy, this is less like a Hobbesian war of all against all, and more like a civil bout in the ring.

Festivals also bring together writers and readers. This can demythologise publishing. Writing is not magic - it is an art and craft, which requires as much tedium and criticism as Olympian reverie. And it is an industry. It is maturing for authors to give a face-to-face account of themselves, unprotected by the page, screen or stage. And it is illuminating for readers to hear of literature's hidden urges, accidents and failures. These are remedies for the diseases of smug writing and lazy reading.

Of course literary festivals can be dull, bitchy, gossipy or shallow. So can authors, astonishingly. But at their best, literary festivals help to develop writers and readers, and both are crucial for a healthy civilisation. They are exactly what town halls ought to contain.

Dr Young is a philosopher and writer, and the author of Distraction. His next book, Philosophy in the Garden (MUP) will be out in November.