Sal Sale

Gerard Callinan is a broadcaster with ABC Gippsland.

Gerard has been a fixture of the ABC Gippsland team since September 2000, when - while the world was busy watching the Sydney Olympics and Cathy Freeman - he became the rural reporter for the region. Over the next three years he learned the craft of producing radio programmes with a mix of humour and a keen sense of being able to detect ‘bulldust’ when he heard it.

After three years in Sale, Gerard took the leap into the big smoke and worked with the NSW Rural team presenting the Country Hour in that state, a time he best describes as ‘interesting’. After six months in Sydney, Gerard took the call to return to Gippsland and become program manager for ABC Gippsland.

Since returning to Gippsland, Gerard has hosted the Morning show, before moving into the Breakfast slot in 2009. This is all a long way from Birmingham in the UK where Gerard originally hails from, and a similar distance from his initial career as a psychiatric nurse, which he worked as from 1985 to 2000.

Peter FitzSimons is a former Wallaby and journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald.

He has interviewed everyone from President George Bush Snr to Sir Edmund Hillary to every Australian Prime Minister since Gough Whitlam. He is also a popular after-dinner speaker and the only Wallaby sent from the field against the All Blacks — unjustly, he swears.

Peter is the author of twenty-one books — including biographies of Nancy Wake, Kim Beazley, Nick Farr-Jones, Steve Waugh, Les Darcy, John Eales and Charles Kingsford Smith — and was Australia’s bestselling non-fiction writer in 2001 and 2004. He is the author of the number-one best-selling military history books Kokoda and Tobruk. He lives in Sydney with his wife Lisa Wilkinson and their three children.