What’s What and Who’s Who in my life and fiction
by ROSS FITZGERALD

An extract from Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech at Tony Abbott’s launch of Chalk and Cheese: A Fabrication (Hybrid Publishing, 2025, pp 262, $24.99)

The Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 6pm September 2, 2025

My latest fiction, Chalk and Cheese, co-authored with the marvellous Ian McFadyen of ‘Comedy Company’ fame, features two 80-year-old, politically influential, former radio stars, Bill Bradley and Ben Curran, who hate each other, but end up in the same nursing home.

A postmodernist academic at Sydney University, who to put it mildly isn’t among my greatest fans, recently told a retired colleague that their names were clearly derived from Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. For those who don’t know, the Flower Pot Men of children’s TV fame, were terracotta puppets who lived at the bottom of an English country garden!

This claim, of course, is utterly false.

Moreover, since Chalk and Cheese : A Fabrication was published in early August, a number of readers have contacted me claiming to know on whom Bill Bradley and Ben Curran were based.

Their not so educated guesses for Bill the right-wing populist range from Alan Jones, Chris Smith and Andrew Bolt, to Ray Hadley – whose surname happens to rhyme with Bill Bradley!

As the prototype for Ben Curran the radical socialist, Phillip Adams, David Marr and Robert Manne head the list, plus one vote for John Pilger who died in December 2023 of pulmonary fibrosis.

It may seem a shame to disappoint them, but in fact Bill and Ben are characters of our sheer imagination.

I first met the London-born Tony Abbott in 2009 after I had written a positive review of Battlelines, his feisty, semi-autobiographical treatise written while the Liberals were languishing in opposition after the defeat of John Howard’s coalition government in 2007.

Then leader of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party, Tony Abbott was particularly pleased when I wrote that his fine critique, published four years before he was elected Prime Minister of Australia in 2013, was an important manifesto detailing his vision for a future direction for conservatives, especially concerning economic and fiscal matters, and policies about public health and Aboriginal affairs.

From 2009 onwards, Tony and I lunched from time to time. Even though our politics were quite different, an affinity between us grew and a friendship gradually developed. In 2014 he invited historian Geoffrey Blainey; the then editor of The Australian Chris Mitchell; and myself and my darling wife and friend of 45 years, Lyndal Moor, for dinner at Kirribilli House, the official Sydney residence of the Prime Minister, with a grand view of the harbour.

The truth is that Tony Abbott was extremely kind to me, and especially so kind to Lyndal when she was dying.

Indeed two days before she died at the Wolper Jewish Hospice in Woollahra on 22 January 2020 he and Lyndal had another long conversation on the telephone. When they finished, Lyndal said to me, “You can always trust Tony.”

After Lyndal died, especially while I was grieving so terribly, he was extremely supportive.

When, three years later, I had triple bypass heart surgery at St Vincent’s Private Hospital in Darlinghurst, Tony was one of the few people who regularly came to visit me. While I was in the Intensive Care Unit, he even organised for me to watch, on pay TV, Collingwood play in the 2023 Grand Final. On the last Saturday in September, in a cliffhanger, the Mighty Magpies beat the Brisbane Lions by 4 points. My screaming in excitement in the ICU nearly gave me a heart attack!

Tony’s generosity of spirit and his kindness to us both I will never forget. This is especially the case because some of his assistance occurred when, in May 2019, he lost to pioneer Teal Independent, Zali Steggall, the seat of Warringah that he had held for 25 years.

Despite personal and political difficulties, to Lyndal and to me Tony Abbott stayed staunch.

In contrast, when it became publicly known that I was a friend of Tony’s, some ‘progressive’ acquaintances of mine, and many in the media, dropped me like a hot scone. For example, after a love-child of the left at ABC Radio National found out about our friendship, he never had me on his program again.

Tellingly, when it came to this book launch, a few former friends baulked at their invite, went ballistic, and refused to respond, let alone come!

How about that?

So now, it’s over to you my friend to do the honours and launch Chalk and Cheese.

But lest I get a swollen head, shortly before she died darling Lyndal reminded me of this one-line review by one of my Queensland enemies: “Ross Fitzgerald is arguably one of Australia’s most prolific, yet least read, authors.”

Let’s hope that Chalk and Cheese: A Fabrication bucks the trend.

Ross Fitzgerald AM is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University. His most recent books, both published by Hybrid, include a memoir, Fifty Years Sober: An Alcoholic’s Journey and a four pack of Grafton Everest political satires, The Ascent of Everest, co-authored with Ian McFadyen.
Quadrant Magazine, October 2025

Tony Abbott’s speech at the launch of Chalk and Cheese: A Fabrication (Hybrid Publishing, 2025, pp 262, $24.99)
The Olsen Gallery, Sydney, 6pm September 2, 2025

It’s a long time since I’ve enjoyed a book as much as Chalk and Cheese. I read it in just two sessions, and it kept me up far later than is normal—sometimes laughing out loud, occasionally tearing up, and often nodding assent at the numerous pungent insights that pepper this moving and highly topical social satire. It’s an easy read but with a very serious point: the necessity of coming to terms with the mental and physical decline that is unavoidable if we live long enough.

The plot features two elderly media personalities who find themselves in the same nursing home. One, a lifelong conservative, seems loosely modelled on Alan Jones. The other, a lifelong leftist activist, is harder to pin down: perhaps he’s an eclectic blend of Phillip Adams and Mike Carlton.

After an awkward early encounter, these two characters reluctantly combine in a common endeavour, encouraged by the solitary grandchild who, for each of them, is the only regular visitor: a podcast featuring the two of them, in avatar form, as “The Lizards of Oz.”

This AI-enabled animation soon becomes a sensation, skewering a range of injustices: the pensioner dudded by a bureaucracy that can’t distinguish between paper assets and real wealth; the retiree denied access to his own money by super funds run for the benefit of managers rather than members; and casual workers whose employers don’t appreciate their efforts or their hours.

I was really enjoying it until their fictional target became a prime minister that tried to raise the aged pension age to 70, and to make people on unemployment benefits apply for 20 jobs each fortnight; in 2014, these were the actual policies of the Abbott government!

But this is neither a right-wing book nor a left-wing one. It’s informed by humanity, not dogma; as befits its lead author, Ross Fitzgerald, who’s conservative on some issues and libertarian on others. The characters are as wry about themselves as they are hard on the follies of these times; and in the course of their collaboration, our two heroes come to appreciate much in the other that they would once have disliked, even despised.

Eventually, their real identities become an issue after a podcast highlighting the prevalence of drugging difficult and cantankerous nursing home residents—not for their own good, but for the convenience of management and staff. For their own safety, our heroes have to escape, helped by those staff who deplore what too-often-happens inside places that, despite the upbeat marketing, are only “close to heaven” in a temporal sense.

There is a satisfyingly happy ending. One of the “Lizards” recovers his health and finds a new love. The other dies—yet much better thought of than he’d ever imagined and securing, as the legacy of his podcast, the criminalisation of extreme forms of elder abuse.

Along the way, there’s much reflecting on life’s vicissitudes: the difficulty of staying faithful, how easy it is to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, and the general imperfectability of man. The real triumph, though is how the co-authors—aged 80 and 77—address the looming prospect of decline, not just with equanimity and insight but with humour too. Laughter, as they say, is the best medicine.

Except that it’s about growing old rather than growing up, Chalk and Cheese reminded me of Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs—deservedly a classic. This too deserves a wide and appreciative readership; as for most of us, it’s our future.

Tony Abbott – Prime Minister of Australia 2013-2015

Quadrant Magazine, October 2025