Peter FitzSimons - a Club Otago lunch not to miss!

Our mid-year Club Otago guest will be the brilliant Australian author and columnist Peter FitzSimons.

Peter’s topic will be – We Australians love you Kiwis. We just want you to love us. Can’t you?

A man of many parts, Peter is currently campaigning against processed sugar in diets, is on the trail of those who treat brain injuries in sport in too blithe a manner and he’s also keen on Australia becoming a republic.

He speaks four languages fluently, is the biographer of Rugby World Cup winning captains Nick Farr-Jones and John Eales, politician Kim Beazley, aviator Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, New Zealand-born war heroine Nancy Wake and Antarctic explorer Sir Douglas Mawson. He has several times been the biggest selling non-fiction author in Australia with such books as Kokoda, Ned Kelly, Tobruk, Eureka and Batavia.

A Simpler Time, where he chronicles his own upbringing, is compulsive reading.

Peter is considered both the most popular after-dinner speaker in Australia and the country’s finest sports journalist. His impressive list of interview credits including ex-president George Bush, Sir Edmund Hillary, Jodie Foster, Nicki Lauda, Joe Montana and Carl Lewis as well as all the major Australian sporting figures from Shane Gould to Lionel Rose to Herb Elliot.

He has fought a Sumo wrestler at the Sydney Opera House, danced on ice with Torville and Dean, told Australian rugby coach and radio talk show icon Alan Jones to his face that he is dead freaking wrong and opened a door for the redoubtable Germaine Greer . . . and lived to tell the tale!

Peter’s address will be humorous, enlightening, entertaining, serious and compelling.