Fitzy responds to Stan’s ‘odd’ claims

Last week, Grant contributed to The Australian’sserialised murder mystery, Oh Matilda: Who Bloody Killed Her? – setting his chapter at “Fitzy and Lisa’s Australia Day barbecue at their grand house overlooking Sydney Harbour”. Grant’s chapter paints the party as a “woke leftie love-in”, writing that the couple have “dot paintings on the wall (of their home), a photo with their arms around Cathy Freeman at Sydney Olympic Stadium and a framed copy of Paul Keating’s Redfern Statement signed by the last great Australian Prime Minister himself”.His unflattering descriptions of the former Wallabies player and his The Project host wife reignited a deep-seated rift between the pair. While Grant, who is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and a proud Wiradjuri man, maintained it was all in jest – telling The Australianhe had hoped to “be a bit silly and have a crack about race, political correctness, left-lovey society” – FitzSimons wasn’t in on the joke. After staying quiet on the rift last week, in The Sydney Morning Heraldyesterday the 59-year-old called “the Stan Grant thing … all rather odd”, adding Grant’s claim that the chapter was satirical “fun fiction” were at odds with what he’d actually written.
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“My wife and I have had an Australia Day party for a couple of decades for long-time friends and close colleagues we have come to know well in the media. Stan has been a semi-regular attendee, only to write a mocking piece about it in The Australian a fortnight ago,” Fitzy wrote in his column. “And that’s where the trouble started … His contention that it was all just fun fiction, all satire, seemed odd as the piece ran complete with real names and a photo of my wife and I, with a comments section where punters in turned sneered at my approach to Indigenous matters.“For the record, and contrary to what Stan wrote, I don’t have a framed Redfern speech on my wall, nor a photo of me hugging Cathy Freeman, nor Indigenous paintings. We don’t even have the party on Australia Day any more, having moved it to an Independence Day gathering the day before, for obvious reasons.” Grant’s description of the party as a “lefty love-in” was also “odd”, FitzSimons added. “I am not in the habit of bandying around the names of my guests because I respect their privacy, but as my friendships have never been confined by political allegiances – tedious! – over the years there have been plenty there from across the political spectrum.” One former guest told The Australian last week that “it’s always been Chatham House (rules) – nobody takes photos or tweets or hashtags; it’s private hospitality, and I think that’s what’s put Pete out is he invited Sam into his home, and three years later got sideswiped”.
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But the “guts” of Grant’s piece, writes FitzSimons, links back to their public fallout last April over a dispute about Captain James Cook’s legacy – the subject of FitzSimons’ latest historical tome – trading barbs in the pages of The Sydney Morning Herald. In an opinion piece at the time, Grant accused FitzSimons of making Cook “the prototypical Aussie good bloke”, adding that his description of the explorer as being far from “an enthusiastic imperialist” was “ludicrous”. In response, FitzSimons defended his work, saying it had been meticulously researched by his team over the course of four years. Grant took a swipe at the biography in his chapter, writing that things “did get a bit weird” for the novel’s titular character, Indigenous woman Matilda Meadows, “when Fitzy excitedly gave her a copy of his latest book, a biography of Captain Cook”.
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“Apparently Cookie was actually not a bad bloke once you got past his order to open fire on the blacks at Botany Bay,” the character notes. “The guts of it is Stan certainly took umbrage at my book on Captain Cook, which, far from being a whitewashing of Cook, was the first major one to point out that it was Cook himself who fired the first shots on the First Nations men so heroically defending their land at Botany Bay,” FitzSimons wrote yesterday. “So that’s where it stands. As to those people who have contacted me asking why they weren’t invited to the annual party, fear not. A couple of vacancies have recently opened up!”