By Damien Murphy
Bob Ellis came back from the dead in Glebe to perform the words of some dead men, some live ones and a fictional one on Sunday.
Labor's most faithful diarist joined five men and a musician to speak the words of great. The sounds and ideas of Cicero, Jesus, Ben Franklin, John Adams, Abe Lincoln, Chief Seattle, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, FDR, JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, Teddy Kennedy, Gough Whitlam, Noel Pearson, Barack Obama, Paul Keating and Jeb Bartlett filled the Glebe Books upstairs reading room.
Bob Ellis famously cut out middlemen obituarists when he took to the internet to announce his end was nigh.Credit: James Alcock
About 90 of the Ellis faithful turned up to listen to their hero deliver a Richard Burton-like reading of his favourite men of letters and power.
Curiously Mr Ellis and friends did not bother to include Mark Twain, the American writer/raconteur who famously read his own obituary and and allegedly said the report was exaggerated.
Late in July, Mr Ellis famously cut out middlemen obituarists when he took to the internet to announce his end was nigh.
"The news is very bad," he wrote on his politics/film/theatre blog, Table Talk, from his Mona Vale Hospital bed where he was receiving treatment for leukemia..
He thought he had aggressive liver cancer and said he may only have six weeks.
Mr Ellis then fell silent for weeks as his treatment continued. Obituarists got to work. But Mr Ellis would not go gently and continued blogging in fits and starts.
By mid-August he was back in full roar.
Earlier in the year Mr Ellis had arranged to join other speakers to perform Orators at Glebe Books but last month's scheduled gig was deferred due to his medical treatment.
On Sunday afternoon, he joined Bill Charlton, Andrew Sharp, Monroe Reimers and Mark Connelly, with Robbie Murphy on keyboard, to perform Orators.The room was full of affection as Mr Ellis took the podium.
"I'd been rehearsing the role of Winston Churchill for 62 years and it seemed foolish to cancel today's performance," Mr Ellis said. His resurrection came the same day that another intellectual figure of Sydney, circa the early 1960s, who has also cried death was regretting his failure to fulfill his prediction.
Clive James, 76, wrote a piece in London's The Guardian confessing he felt embarrassed for being alive one year after predicting his imminent death from terminal leukaemia.
Mr James reflected on a poem he wrote for The New Yorker last year titled Japanese Maple, in which he stated, confidently, that he would be dead before the maple tree in his garden lost its leaves in autumn.
Now he feared he had "written himself into a corner".
"Winter arrived, there has been a whole other summer, and now the maple is just starting to do its flaming thing all over again, with me shyly watching."