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Bob Ellis says he may have weeks to live after liver tests deliver 'very bad' news Bob Ellis says he may have weeks to live after liver tests deliver 'very bad' news
(about 4 hours later)
The writer and political commentator Bob Ellis says he may have only weeks to live. The writer Bob Ellis has been diagnosed with aggressive liver cancer and says he may have just weeks to live.
“The news is very bad and I may have months to live but it is more like weeks,” he posted on his personal blog on Sunday. A prolific author, journalist and screenwriter, Ellis has written speeches for Labor leaders including Bob Carr, Paul Keating and Kim Beazley, but in recent years singled out Julia Gillard for harsh criticism in his election diary Suddenly, Last Winter.
Ellis, 73, writing his blog Table Talk from Mona Vale hospital on Sydney’s northern beaches, said on Friday he was awaiting tests on his liver function, “which look ominous”. He warned that the blog “may cease altogether” within weeks. “The news is very bad and I may have months to live but it is more like weeks,” Ellis, 73, posted on his personal blog Table Talk on Sunday.
He had aggressive liver cancer, he told Fairfax Media. “I’m angry because I’m doing my best writing now.” The editor of Independent Australia, Dave Donovan, who publishes Ellis’s regular commentary, confirmed the news was bleak on Twitter on Monday.
Ellis characteristically did not miss the opportunity to take a potshot at Tony Abbott, writing on the blog: Sadly, confirmed Bob Ellis really is very ill and the prognosis is grim.
“I commend Mona Vale hospital, a very fine place to be. Abbott is reducing it, and replacing it with something nearer his home in Forestville.” Ellis’s friend Wendy Harmer told Guardian Australia she admired him greatly as a writer.
Ellis has been a prolific writer of books, plays, screenplays, speeches and commentary for almost 50 years. “Bob’s long and passionate love affair with the English language is an inspiration to anyone who loves words,” Harmer said.
He has had a tempestuous relationship with the Labor party, having written extensively on its history and penned speeches for a number of its prominent personalities, but also fiercely criticised its leaders, most notably Julia Gillard. “Every line he writes crackles with energy. Every essay and column is stuffed full of ideas, erudition and an exhortation to action. And, after all these years honing his fine craftsmanship, his words still have the same raw power you’d find from a speaker standing under a tree in the Domain. As a performer, the finest compliment I can offer is that Bob’s words are best said aloud.”
One book on Labor, Goodbye Jerusalem, had to be pulped and reprinted after Abbott and the former treasurer Peter Costello, and their wives, sued for defamation. Journalist Mike Carlton was a fellow cadet with Ellis in the ABC newsroom in Sydney in the 1960s.
In 1994 he stood unsuccessfully as an independent against Bronwyn Bishop in the federal seat of Mackellar. “I’ve always thought he was half mad, but in the nicest possible way, and I amresidually very fond of him,” Carlton told Guardian Australia. “It’s very sad to hear that he is at death’s door although, given his capacity for lurid exaggeration, he may actually be in rude good health but just a bit bored.”
Ellis said on his blog he hoped to be able to launch his latest book, a “political fiction” called Abbott: The Worst Three Hundred Days, in August if his health permitted. A writer of books, plays, screenplays, speeches and commentary for almost 50 years, Ellis is being treated at Mona Vale hospital on Sydney’s northern beaches. A friend told Guardian Australia Ellis was undergoing more tests on Monday.
On Monday he posted: “Am feeling a bit crook, and hearing of miracle cures ... There have been many, many lovely messages.” Ellis has been posting health updates since Saturday when he revealed was waiting for the result of a liver function test and his blog “may cease altogether”.
But not even the shock diagnosis was enough to stop him writing about politics. He continued to blog about his nemesis, the Speaker Bronwyn Bishop, whom he famously stood against in the seat of Mackellar in 1994.
“It is certain she will not go of her own accord,” he wrote of her expenses crisis.
He said Bishop had been well on the way to the prime ministership until he “brought her undone”.
Ellis also promised to forge ahead with the launch of his latest book, a “political fiction” called Abbott: The Worst Three Hundred Days, in August if his health permitted.
As messages of support poured in, Ellis wrote on Monday “Am feeling a bit crook, and hearing of miracle cures ... There have been many, many lovely messages.”
While he has enjoyed acclaimed as an author, a defamation action brought by Tony Abbott and former treasurer Peter Costello against his political book Goodbye Jerusalem (1997) almost broke him and cost the publisher $277,000.
“It cost me the right to address massed rallies at demonstrations,” Ellis told the ABC in 2004. “It cost me the column on moral issues I had in the Sydney Morning Herald. It cost me status, unbelievable. I had a future before it. I have now, probably, only a past.”
He has written dozens of film and television scripts, including the 1992 feature film The Nostradamus Kid, an autobiographical story in which Noah Taylor played a young Ellis in pursuit of a young woman.
He also wrote Cactus, Man of Flowers and My First Wife with Paul Cox in the 1990s and won an Australian Film Institute award for the 1978 movie Newsfront.
The cinematographer on The Nostradamus Kid, Geoff Burton, said Ellis was “inexplicably” attractive to women in his youth despite his dishevelled appearance.
“He had shocking greasy hair,” Burton told the ABC. “In those days he wore a full-length gaberdine overcoat and for months I never knew what he had on underneath it, if anything. And yet he managed to attract these most extraordinary women.”
His marriage to fellow writer Anne Brooksbank, with whom he has three children, has survived despite his admission of infidelity in the late 1990s.
Ellis once described himself as somewhere between a philosopher and a standup comedian, both of whom “bring new thoughts in the world”.