Peter FitzSimons - an enthralling Club Otago Lunch

15/07/2016

Internationally acclaimed author, Australian Republican chair and former Wallaby rugby international, Peter FitzSimons brilliantly enthused a sell-out Club Otago lunch crowd at the Dunedin Town Hall (Wednesday 13th July).

In a wide-ranging address, Peter covered such diverse topics as his international playing career (where he admitted to being continually humbled by the All Blacks and New Zealand provincial teams) and told behind the scenes stories about some of his team mates, his memories of Nancy Wake – the New Zealand born heroine of World War II and about whom he wrote his incomparable biography The White Mouse, his time with Sir Edmund Hillary, his thoughts on the unbreakable bonds between New Zealand and Australia, and where he sees the Australian Republican movement going.
He was enlightening, clever, erudite and very, very funny.

Peter waxed lyrical about the New Zealand landscape, the architecture in our smaller towns and his joy in flying from Dunedin to Antarctica as part of his research into his book about Sir Douglas Mawson, the great Australian explorer whose travels on the ice coincided with that of Scott, Amundsen and Shackleton.

The 350 in attendance were richly entertained.