Your favourite lines – and mine – from the crazy-brave world that was 2025

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

December 21, 2025 — 5.00am

Thank you, members of the Academy. That’s a wrap for another busy year at FMWF, getting through a diverse array of 45 interview subjects. Here is a quick look back at the exchanges that most resonated with you, or most moved me, or turned out to be particularly prescient.

Early on, you loved my interview with Lorenzo Montesini who, three decades ago, was the key player in Sydney’s high-water mark of gossip when he famously left Melbourne socialite “Pitty Pat” Dunlop standing at the altar in Venice, while he ran off with his best man, Robert Straub. Lorenzo flew back into Sydney to be met by dozens of journalists and photographers – and one other, the legendary impresario Harry M. Miller.

Lorenzo Montesini and Primrose Dunlop in April 1990, after the wedding invitations were sent out.

LM: Yes, Harry M. got me alone and proffered a contract for an exclusive deal to tell my story to The Australian Women’s Weekly and 60 Minutes, in return for $180k, an extraordinary amount of money. I said, “I’m not sure, Harry. I’d like a couple of weeks to think about it.”

Fitz: Whereupon he shared with you the north star he had steered his entire deal-making career on...

LM: He said, “Lorenzo, in this business, you’ve got to get them while they have a hard-on.” I signed.

In April – in his last time at bat – I spoke to iconic ABC election analyst Antony Green, who gave a fascinating insight into who would probably win the coming federal election on May 3.

Fitz: You’re saying the Coalition campaign looks amateurish?

AG: [Very long pause.] Ummmm, it doesn’t look as well organised as the Labor campaign. Where are the announcements? Where’s the detail? And the measure I always use is, who’s got the more interesting pictures in the TV news?

Fitz: Really? Why do you say that, particularly?

AG: For one thing because they are the pictures that so much of the population is influenced by, those people who don’t follow the politics closely. And at the moment, Anthony Albanese looks happy and engaged every day in the stories, meeting interesting people, while Peter Dutton doesn’t seem nearly as engaged. The Coalition campaign looks a little lifeless, as though preparing for something else.

Election analyst Antony Green on the ABC election set for the last time.

Fitz: You are looking at things in a different way…

AG: Well, that is what people see every night. They see this picture and that picture, the detail washes over them, but they’ve got this sense that one side looks more interesting than the other, just in terms of pictures. It does have an impact.

My most frustrating interview of the year was in August, with NSW Minister for Gaming and Racing David Harris, as I couldn’t even get him to agree that the wretched pokies are “misery machines”.

Fitz: Let’s have a mind experiment. There are two communities of 10,000 people. One’s got no poker machines, the other has got one pokie for every 47 adults, which is what the situation is in the Sydney suburb of Fairfield right now. What would be your expectation of the net amount of misery in those two communities when compared?

DH: What’s your definition of misery?

Fitz: Start with domestic violence, bankruptcies, depression, suicides, depression, etc.

DH: But are you taking into account alcohol, are you taking into account unemployment and other factors?

Fitz: [Frustrated.] No. All else equal. In the Fair Dinkum Department, in the No Bullshit Department, which one do you expect will be happiest?

DH: I can’t definitively say because it’s not black and white.

Fitz: Talk about playing with [a dead bat!]. Look, minister, NSW has 37 per cent of the world’s pub and club poker machines! But we’ve only got 0.1 per cent of the global population! Surely this strikes you as a problem! With your job being to help fix it!

Gaming and Racing Minister David Harris.

DH: Gambling overall is a problem, but so is alcohol. We regulate alcohol to make sure that where possible, people are safe. So in gambling, we’ve got to do the same thing. We recognise that there are issues and that where people experience harm, governments have to do better at helping them, and put in place guidelines to make sure that people don’t get into harm in the first place.

Fitz: [Incredulous.] OK, but ipso facto, it doesn’t strike you as: “Jesus wept. This is an enormous problem! This is batshit crazy!”

DH: Absolutely, it’s a problem, but it’s an environment that’s grown up over 30 years.

A short time later, I interviewed debut author Natalie Kyriacou about her book Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction.

Fitz: OK ... Why did the scientist build a helmet to get her head humped by a flightless bird, and how can this save the species?

Author and environmentalist Natalie Kyriacou.

NK: So the kākāpō is a critically endangered bird from New Zealand. It is the world’s heaviest parrot and is also the only parrot in the world that cannot fly. There’s under 250 of them left in the wild, and they face a few reproductive challenges, one of which is that the male parrots sometimes try to mate with human heads and inanimate objects. You see, their mating ritual isn’t overly advanced. The men waddle up a hill together, dig a hole and start bellowing into it with the hope that the female kākāpō will be irresistibly drawn to them.

Fitz: This is sounding a tad familiar, but go on.

NK: Unfortunately, the females aren’t often interested in this particular brand of male romance. So the males end up often mating with … other things … There was actually a YouTube video that went viral because a kākāpō named Sirocco started humping a BBC presenter’s head, launching him to international fame. Anyway, as we know, the kākāpō struggles to reproduce and is critically endangered. So a scientist called Kate McInnes developed an unusual scientific innovation to help the parrot reproduce. She went out and bought a rugby helmet and then sat in her backyard and repurposed it into an ejaculation helmet.

Fitz: Wait! Excuse me. Dare I ask how – and I am so glad I didn’t know this 40 years ago – one turns a rugby helmet into an “ejaculation helmet”?

NK: She put divots in it, so it was like she had a hat of condoms designed to collect the sperm of the parrot.

The story had a happy ending …

Meantime, the following month, out of left field came one Daniel Jackson, a 20-year-old Australian, and also the president of the “Free Republic of Verdis”, about 50 hectares of land situated on the Danube between Croatia and Serbia, which he and supporters have claimed as a country of their own. I began by asking the obvious: how the hell could two neighbouring countries, already having border disputes, overlook 50 hectares in the bottom drawer?

Daniel Jackson, 20, is the self-appointed president of Verdis.

DJ: It’s complicated. But it is because the river line was changed deliberately by the Austria-Hungary Empire about 150 years ago. And Croatia considers its borders to be defined by where the Danube used to run, whereas Serbia considers its borders to be the current centre line of the Danube. So Verdis is the bit left over, between the old Danube river line, and the new river line. For Croatia to be consistent in claiming their border as the old river line – which gives them more land in claims higher up on the Danube – they had to leave this bit behind.

Fitz: Land, Cap’n! I see land off our starboard bow!

DJ: So the idea of claiming it, and starting our own country with our own constitution and system of government, started to take hold. My mates and I gave it a name, “Verdis”, Latin for green. We designed a flag. The bottom blue bit represents the Danube River. The white in the middle represents peace, modernisation and unity, because those are our key values. The top piece represents clear skies, so that, too, is blue. For currency, we stayed with the Euro, and [we] established our three official languages as English, Croatian and Serbian. The next step, obviously, was to create a government, and put up a permanent settlement.

Which they did. He conceded that when they did so, the Croatian authorities “did not react very well, to be honest”, and he briefly had to get a zebra suntan, but he is intent to go on.

The high-water mark of the year, in terms of reader reaction, was when I interviewed my former rugby coach, and your former prime minister, Tony Abbott, as he promoted his book Australia: A History – How an Ancient Land Became a Great Democracy. I reminded him of a particular episode that has always stuck with me.

Former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd brandishing each other’s books, in Washington.

Fitz: Late in the 2019 election campaign, when Zali Steggall was coming at you like a steam train, you were outside the Avenue Cafe in Mosman, on your own, handing out leaflets. I waved at you, and you came in and had a cup of tea.

TA: I remember!

Fitz: And I said, “How’s it going, Abbo?” You said, and I quote: “It’s tough. Five years ago, I sat at the top table as host of the G-20 flanked by the likes of Barack Obama, Xi Jinping, David Cameron and Vladimir Putin. And I’ve just come from handing out leaflets at Spit Junction bus stop and people are winding down their windows and calling out ‘F--- off you dickhead!’” Then you paused and said, “But, I guess that’s good for the soul”. I mean, Jesus wept, you were still smiling!

TA: [Laughing uproariously, before pausing, and being reflective.] Mate, you’ve got to smile, because the alternative is to cry.

The next month, I interviewed the great American comedienne Rosie O’Donnell, who was visiting Australia to do her show Common Knowledge at the Opera House. I reminded her of her famous feud with Donald Trump, which started in 2006 on The View when she held up a metaphorical middle finger and said: “Donald, sit and spin, my friend!”

Rosie O’Donnell at the Sydney Opera House ahead of her show Common Knowledge.

RD: Yes, one of his Teen Miss America girls had been photographed kissing a girl in a bar, and he made her publicly apologise to the world at a press conference. Our show was on right after it, so I said all the truths about him, about how outrageous it was that he was presenting himself as the moral compass. “Sit and spin!” So that started a 20-year feud, and I’ve never had a conversation with the man ever in my life. A lot of people give up, but I don’t. When he takes a shot, I take a shot right back. In his first term, he was cultivating hatred, racism, bigotry. So when he was elected the second time, knew I needed to move to Ireland. And I did.

Fitz: Trump has infamously threatened to revoke your citizenship. When you next turn up at JFK Airport going back to your own country, your own state, will you be nervous when you present your passport saying, “I am Rosie O’Donnell, American citizen who hasn’t even scored a parking fine in recent times, here, on a brief visit home?”

RD: Yes, because his followers are dangerous, violent people. The people at the insurrection on J-6 were not left-wing liberals. They were all Trump followers in MAGA hats, and they were encouraged to go and do that by Trump. So I will be nervous about getting in because he uses me, and he has for 22 years, to rile his base. He uses me as his arch enemy and nemesis, like we’re in some kind of Batman movie. He uses me as this big, bad, scary thing that America should be afraid of – and a third of the country believes him, so that makes it an extremely dangerous place for me to be. But I won’t stop being myself. I won’t stop saying how democracy is in danger and we’re on the precipice of fascism if we don’t act now.

Bridget Kelly in front the ASN Clock Tower in the Rocks, on which her artwork was projected during Vivid.

And yet there were still many heart-warming subjects to cover, none more so than my friend Bridget Kelly, a great artist who happens to have Down syndrome. I interviewed her by text, with the help of her sister, Morag.

Fitz: Bridget, I put out a post on X with this photo of you standing in front your art. I was stunned at the response. Many people asked me to tell you how much they love your art. We all do. Warmest congratulations to you.

BK: Thank you for sharing my art. Art makes me feel seen. People know me as an artist and I love it. I feel so happy that I can show people how I see the world.

Fitz: One man replying to my post said he has a two-year-old daughter with Down syndrome, and your story has inspired him and gives him hope. Do you want me to tell her something back?

BK: Can you please tell him to follow his daughter’s interests? That’s what Mum and Dad did for me. Who knows where it might lead!

Good luck to us all in these trying times, and I wish you all a great break. See you in six weeks.