By ROSS FITZGERALD
Last time Scott Morrison faced a federal election, he pulled off a self-confessed “miracle” victory. That happened in 2019, but it may not happen again. This is because the Prime Minister faces a pincer movement from the left and the right. Also, the never-ending Covid saga finds him increasingly trapped between a rock and a very hard place.
The coming election will most likely turn on the public’s perception of who can best keep us safe. But regardless of its outcome, securing our personal health and safety is set …
Stuart Macintyre
The Party – The Communist Party of Australia from heyday to reckoning
Allen & Unwin, $42.50, 512pp, ISBN: 9781760875183
reviewed by ROSS FITZGERALD
When I was a fifteen-year-old student at Melbourne High School, I tried to join the Communist Party of Australia. One afternoon after school in June 1959, outside the Bryant & May match factory in Richmond, I met a CPA organiser, who I later found was a leading operative, Rex Mortimer. Before our meeting, I’d had a few beers at the local pub.
After listening for …
The Sydney Morning Herald & The Age
FICTION PICK OF THE WEEK
The Lowest DepthsRoss Fitzgerald & Ian McFadyen, Hybrid, $24.99
reviewed by Cameron Woodhead
Riffing off The Lower Depths – the Maxim Gorky play about being down and out in Russia – the latest Grafton Everest novel sees our mock-hero on assignment in Moscow.
This time, Grafton’s breathless incompetence is required by the United Nations. His mission? To expose electoral fraud in Russia. He does have an ulterior motive – he’s found a decades-old letter from his mother to someone in the Soviet Union, suggesting that …
Ross Fitzgerald & Ian McFadyen, The Lowest Depths, Hybrid Publishers: Melbourne, $24.95.
Reviewed by Dr Alan Gregory
Graham Green’s term “An Entertainment”, probably best sums up this beautifully produced book.
The Lowest Depths is a very good read, with equal elements of a socio-politico farce and of a spy thriller, plus a touch of sci-fi!
As with its predecessor, The Dizzying Heights, this book featuring Dr Professor Grafton Everest is written by two Melbourne High School Old Boys – Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen.
Ross Fitzgerald AM is Emeritus Professor of History & Politics at Griffith University. …
ROSS FITZGERALD
History Wars: The Peter Ryan – Manning Clark Controversy
by Doug Munro
ANU Press, 2021,193 pages, $55.
Who doesn’t love a good literary stoush? But a controversy is even more intriguing if it touches on the History and Culture Wars of relatively recent times.
The Australian historian Manning Clark (1915-1991) and his long-time publisher at Melbourne University Press, Peter Ryan (1923-2015) are both deceased. Some younger readers might be wondering who these two gents were. But an older demographic especially might like to read my take on what was, in the mid …
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Not long ago, federal Education Minister Alan Tudge wondered out loud whether today’s school kids would be willing to fight for a country they’d been taught not to believe in.
It’s a fair question: why would young people be willing to risk their lives for an Australia they’d been taught to believe was fundamentally illegitimate, had a sub-optimal culture and was helping to destroy the planet by exporting coal to the wider world?
Yet that’s the intellectual subtext for every course these days, given the national curriculum’s insistence that all …
Cardinal George Pell: a man of sorrows
Sensationally, in April 2020, all seven judges of the High Court of Australia quashed Pell’s conviction.
Cardinal Pell, The Media Pile-On & Collective Guilt
By Gerard Henderson,
Connor Court Publishing
457pp, $39.95
Reviewed by ROSS FITZGERALD
The case of George Pell revealed deep fault lines in Australian society. Some people were convinced of his innocence, but many others wanted him to be guilty.
The trial, retrial, and conviction in December 2018 of Cardinal Pell for historical child sexual abuse of two choirboys at Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral that allegedly occurred in …
By Ross Fitzgerald
He’s the man who would be king, but Josh Frydenberg originally wanted to be a tennis pro rather than a politician. No doubt we will be going through his biography with a fine-tooth-comb if he eventually takes over as Liberal party leader.
If he does, he could become Australia’s first Jewish Prime Minister. His ascendancy is not guaranteed however because we all know that politics is an uncertain game. Frankly, who thought Scott Morrison would ever be PM?
After leaving school at Mount Scopus College, Frydenberg trained at a tennis …
In terms of damage, alcohol is society’s most dangerous drug.
Helen Trinca makes it clear how integral alcohol is to socialising in the workplace, including Parliament House (“Welcome to the house of blokes, booze and bullies” (12/2)
She rightly supports Sex Discrimination Commissioner Kate Jenkins, who wants alcohol policies implemented “with a view to restricting availability in line with work health and safety obligations, and the principle of harm minimisation.”
Our policy priorities are wrong-headed. How stupid it is, for example, that during our lockdowns , bottle shops were regarded as essential services …
A riotous work of comedy – full of twists and turns that would put an Olympic gymnast to shame
The eighth book in the Grafton Everest series is back in the hands of the prolific and visionary author Ross Fitzgerald, teamed up again with comic genius Ian McFadyen, and sees the hapless ex-President of the Republic of Australia, Dr Professor Grafton Everest, caught up in a web of international espionage and intrigue that he is hopelessly ill-equipped to handle.
Abandoned to his own inadequate devices when his wife Janet departs on a world …
THE LOWEST DEPTHS
By Ross Fitzgerald, Ian McFadyen
Hybrid Publishers, Fiction
200pp, $24.99
Reviewed by Cheryl Akle
Ross Fitzgerald and Ian McFadyen team up again to write the 8th book in their amusing Grafton Everest series.
When we last saw Dr Professor Grafton Everest, he’d become President of the Republic of Australia, spending most of his term on a goodwill tour of the US.
In The Lowest Depths he’s the ex-president, his wife has left him to travel, and he’s caught up in a web of trouble and intrigue. An assignment with the UN results in some interesting information …
