The best bits of Fitz. My best chats of 2024

Thank you, thank you, all! Thank you to my interview subjects who have agreed to a mostly light cross-examination, even if Simon Holmes a Court did refer to me afterwards on social media as “a professional gadfly”, which I gather is a little beastie known to bite thoroughbreds. By Gawd, I resemble that remark!

Meantime, thank you to you, readers. This year, as last, I have published 46 interviews in this space and enjoyed them hugely. On a quick look back, these are the exchanges that most resonated with you, or most moved me, or turned out to be particularly prescient.

Clockwise from top left: Briony Scott, Sally McManus, Oliver Stone, Jelena Dokic and Ita Buttrose.Credit: Fairfax, AP, AAP

I opened the batting with Jelena Dokic in late January, and she was not long in taking me and mine of the press brigade to task for not having done more to protect her as a teenager when we could see with our own eyes how dangerous her father, Damir, seemed to be.

JD: “They all did interviews with my father who was obviously very aggressive and drunk nine out of 10 times when he was doing interviews. And I just wish someone would have said ‘look, there are two underage kids going home with this person, and that’s not OK’, because my brother was eight years younger than me. And I wish maybe that there was a little bit more concern instead of making him a joke and a punch line. When my book, Unbreakable, came out, I can’t tell you how many journalists came to me personally and apologised, and I really appreciate that.”

Fitz: “Well, you have my apologies, too.”

In February, I was thrilled to interview the great cinematic impresario and political activist of global standing Oliver Stone. When I asked what the most formative period of his life was, he replied:

OS: “The Vietnam War was certainly a strong influence. The world seemed to be full of lies, and going into Vietnam – serving and seeing the way we were lied to – was formative. They tell you that this is the truth and it’s not.”

When he mentioned that he had often come to Australia on R&R from Vietnam, I asked the obvious.

Fitz: “In that case, you must know Kings Cross and our once-famous Bourbon & Beefsteak bar?”

OS: [Pause.] “Yes. I had a whole story at that bar with a charming hostess later claiming she was having my child. I sent some support. She never really followed up, and I assumed it wasn’t true. Thirty years went by, and one fine day in Sydney, it was quite some shock for me to answer the door to my hotel and see an attractive, young, tall woman saying, ‘Hello, I’m your daughter’.”

In the end, it wasn’t. But I loved the story.

The subject matter that got the biggest reaction was the efficacy or otherwise of nuclear energy as an option for Australia, and the biggest hit was Professor Ty Christopher, of the University of Wollongong, whom I talked to in June. He pulled no punches when I asked him what he made of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plans.

TC: [With some agitation.] “If the Coalition is all in on nuclear and thinks it’s the best thing since sliced bread, why did they say nothing and do nothing about it for the last decade that they were in power? I’ve asked opposition energy spokesperson Ted O’Brien that question many times, and I’m yet to receive an answer … When people ask me, am I anti-nuclear, I look them in the eye and I say ‘no, I’m anti-bullshit.’ And what we’re hearing at the moment from the Coalition in terms of the timing and the costs of nuclear and where it fits into the energy grid … it is largely bullshit. We need to pull back from all of this. Renewables are the cheapest. They are reliable enough for what we need, they are the best way to bring down customer bills and they are the best way for us to decarbonise our economy, which is what we have committed to do.”

A personal favourite to interview was Sally McManus, the boss of the ACTU, because she is so powerful and yet we know so little about her.

Fitz: “I love, on the story of your rise, the Alan Jones angle! Tell all ...”

SM: “It was a bit over a decade ago, and Jones was going on about how Julia Gillard should be put into ‘a chaff bag’ and sunk at sea, and how women were ‘destroying the joint’. And there was a whole lot of us who asked ‘when are we going to fight back about this?’ So I set up a Facebook page called Destroy the Joint and started recruiting people, like Jenna Price. We ran a big campaign targeting sponsors of Alan Jones’ show, calling on people not to buy their products if they continued advertising with him.”

Fitz: “Was it a bitter satisfaction for you to see Jones’ sponsors run screaming for the hills, or joyous?”

SM: “Absolutely joyous. The best thing of all was the CEO of Mercedes-Benz in Germany writing a letter to Jones, which became public, broadly saying, ‘These aren’t our values, and we want our Mercedes back from you!’ He had to give it back. Jones then reached out to some people in the union movement and said ‘what can be done to stop Sally McManus?’ and they reported back to me that they’d ‘never heard him scared before’.”

Equally enjoyable to chat to was the iconic Ita Buttrose in her final days as chair of the ABC.

Fitz: “Are you a monarchist or a republican?”

IB: “That’s very sneaky. Ultimately, Australia will become a republic, but I’m constantly surprised how loyal our nation is to the royal family. I suppose they’ve all grown up with the royal family and think of them as being a part of their own family.”

Fitz: “Yes, but you, Ita? Will you say now, what I begged you to say when I was chair of the Australian Republic Movement, that you are a republican?”

IB: [Laughing, then deadpan.] “I am the chair of the ABC and have no view. Ask me in a week.”

I did, but she was gone for dust!

Fitz: “I don’t know if this story is true, but I have a scrap of memory that [when you were famously editing Cleo], Kerry Packer’s father, Sir Frank, once gave you a lesson about men’s bodies.”

IB: “Yes. [Laughs.] Cleo had done a piece on how men’s erogenous zones included their armpits. Sir Frank saw the draft and called me down to his office. He was trying desperately to understand the new progressive woman, but this went too far for him. And he said ‘where did you get this information? A man’s armpit is not sexy!’ The story did not run.”

Still on the ABC and it was wonderful to hear David Marr on why he left one of his own most iconic roles.

Fitz: “Beyond newspapers, you also had a huge presence on the ABC’s once-mighty Insiders, and the nation really would lean in. How long since you’ve been on that show?”

DM: “I sort of drifted off with the new regime. David Speers wanted actual insiders on Insiders, and I was never a Canberra reporter. I was rather afraid of getting down to Canberra and becoming friends with power. The distance between Sydney and Canberra is good for people like me. So I’m not an insider in that sense, and the show has taken a different path. But yes, there is, for some reason, still a public appetite for David Marr having a stoush with Gerard Henderson.”

Fitz: “Do you miss Gerard Henderson?”

DM: “God no!”

In the history of this column, I have never received so many commendations from readers as I have for the interview I did with the outgoing principal of Wenona, Dr Briony Scott, just a few weeks ago.

Fitz: “OK, so to the nub of it. What do you see in 2024 as the greatest challenges in being a teenage girl?”

BS: “One of the biggest challenges is that people are so quick to pathologise adolescence for them … ”

Fitz: “In what sense ‘pathologise’?”

BS: “In the sense that we can never let a child just be sad; they’re ‘depressed’. They can never just be worried; they have ‘anxiety’. There is a fear when a girl goes through a very normal and healthy range of emotions. We are so quick to move in when, in fact, part of life is that it actually sucks, right? Tough things happen, and the key thing all young ones need is to learn how to be able to grapple with them. With this tendency to assume that girls are all struggling with daily life, we can miss or overlook a child who is genuinely struggling and out of their depth.”

Fitz: “Go on.”

BS: “There’s the old story about the caterpillar struggling to get out of a cocoon, and your instinct is to want to help it out, so you cut open the cocoon. But now the butterfly that was inside can’t fly because the way it was strengthening its wings was by pushing against the cocoon and being able to build up that strength. We want our young people to have the strength to fly. Our job is not to make people happy, and our job is not to entertain children. When a young one is upset or hurt, it is not automatically a reason for 10 adults to come rushing in. The first job is to walk alongside them and help strengthen them so that they can deal with whatever life throws their way.

”There’s this beautiful Ram Dass quote that just goes ‘we’re all just walking each other home’. It’s a good reminder that it’s not our job to solve everyone’s problems. And, in fact, most of us can’t solve each other’s problems; it’s just about bearing witness to what is going on in other people’s lives, about being there.”

Fitz: “Of the many conversations you and I have had, one of the ones that has most fascinated me is your end-of-year chat to year 12 Wenona students, where you talk to them about such things as sex, and have a frank chat about what they might be facing.”

BS: “Yes, it’s part of a subject called renaissance studies, and it’s all about life beyond school, and ... it’s important. Because we are in the age of porn, I also talk to them about unreal expectations they might face [in their sex lives] as to what is normal, what is expected of them. And I provide a counterpoint. Many young women and young men find themselves in positions where they are so incredibly uncomfortable engaging in various acts that they think they’re the problem because they don’t want to do it, or that they’re not ready for it, right? Everyone goes ‘yeah, this is normal’. Like giving oral sex is a really normal expectation, right? And if that gives you joy, then great. But if they don’t hear a counterpoint to the argument that ‘everyone does it, so you must do it, too’ – a non-judgmental counterpoint – then how on earth are they meant to steer? So ask yourselves ... is this actually what you want? Or are you doing it because you’re afraid that if you don’t do it, there’s something wrong with you? So I’m very happy to talk about it.”

And I was very happy to talk to her, and to many of you via emails and social media. I wish you all a great break. If you need me, you shall find me between the flags on the beach, thinking what a strange but wonderful thing it is to be “a professional gadfly”.

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