by ROSS FITZGERALD
FYI : This version of my letter appeared in today’s Australian Financial Review.
Given the lifesaving work of Alcoholics Anonymous, AA should be regarded as an essential service and its meetings still be open to its members.
Otherwise many alcoholics and other addicts will fall off the program
Surely attending AA is more important than attend the hairdresser!
Ross Fitzgerald,
Redfern, NSW
The Australian Financial Review, 27 March 2020, p 35.
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Given the life-saving work of Alcoholics Anonymous, AA should be regarded as an essential service and its meetings still be open to its members.
Otherwise many alcoholics and other addicts will get back on the booze and drugs.
Surely members being able to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous is of more importance than being allowed to attend the hairdresser!
Professor Ross Fitzgerald, Redfern
The Daily Telegraph (Sydney),
27 March, 2020, Letters, p 70
By Martin Hanson
Every few years around St Patrick’s Day, historian Ross Fitzgerald “reminds” everyone how the Communist MLA Fred Paterson was “bashed” that day in 1948 during a Brisbane street march.
Fitzgerald started out condemning Queensland’s Hanlon government as being of the awful, long-successful, right-wing Labor type. In 2007 he advanced to the allegation that a police officer may have bashed Paterson on the orders of premier Ned Hanlon. Now he links the event to the corruption that was exposed by the Fitzgerald Inquiry after 32 years of Liberal-Country Party …
by Professor Ross Fitzgerald AM
Speech to The Sydney Institute, 47 Phillip Street, Sydney, Monday March 23, 2020.
I am very pleased that one of my closest friends in Sydney, Gerard Henderson, is launching my memoir today.
When writing this speech, by mistake I had originally typed … one of my closet friends, Gerard Henderson.
Well I thought that was funny!
After all I do write satirical novels. But often what I think is funny, other people don’t.
Anyway, despite of everything in these trying times, Gerard Henderson is indeed launching my memoir here at The Sydney Institute, and I’m very grateful.
To put …
Professor Ross Ross Fitzgerald’s 42nd book, a memoir, FIFTY YEARS SOBER : AN ALCOHOLIC’S JOURNEY (Hybrid Publishers: Melbourne, $ 27.50) is now available.
FIFTY YEARS SOBER by Ross Fitzgerald can be purchased as a paperback and an e-book direct from Hybrid Publishers in Melbourne, and from the distributor New Holland.
Best wishes, Professor Ross Fitzgerald AM
Missing William Tyrrell
By Caroline Overington. HarperCollins, 304pp, $34.99
Review by ROSS FITZGERALD
In ‘Missing William Tyrrell’, journalist and author Caroline Overington provides a series of compelling questions and answers regarding the most infamous recent case of a child who seems to have simply vanished. In doing so, she has produced her best book yet. The disappearance of three-year-old William, on the morning of September 12, 2014, from a quiet street in the mid-north-coast NSW village of Kendall is one of Australia’s most baffling and harrowing mysteries.
The boy was last seen playing in …
Here is the text of Phil Brown’s review, which accompanies a photo of the books’ front cover.
FIFTY YEARS SOBER : AN ALCOHOLIC’S JOURNEY
By Ross Fitzgerald
Hybrid Publishers:Melbourne , $27.50
by Phil Brown.
First a disclaimer: the author is a friend of mine and I get a mention in the book.
Now that’s out of the way I want to recommend this updated version of Ross Fitzgerald’s entertaining and sobering (pardon the pun) memoir.
It’s a cautionary and edifying tale of a life lived sober, mostly.
The author’s battle with alcoholism and his long sobriety thanks to …
This cautionary tale of corruption and violence should be told again and again
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Tuesday is Saint Patrick’s Day, which is an occasion to celebrate — but it also marks one of the most infamous incidents in Australian political history.
On March 17, 1948, in Brisbane, Australia’s first and only Communist Party MP, Frederick (“Fred”) Woolnough Paterson, was savagely bashed by a plainclothes policeman — almost certainly on the direct orders of authoritarian ALP premier Edward Michael (“Ned”) Hanlon.
This brutal attack occurred while Paterson was legally observing a march of striking …
Book Review
Party Animals: The Secret History of a Labor Fiasco
By Samantha Maiden.Viking, 314pp, $34.99
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Samantha Maiden is the latest of four journalists — the other three being Niki Savva, David Crowe and Aaron Patrick — who have written books about the 2019 federal election.
Like Bill Shorten and most of his frontbench, Savva and Crowe had assumed the ALP was a shoo-in. Hence after the May 18 result each had to change the title of their books.
Instead of ‘Highway to Hell: The Coup that Destroyed Malcolm Turnbull and Left the …
by ROSS FITZGERALD
In ten years’ time, what will people say about the Morrison government? The Coalition’s deepest problem is not that the National Party has become a circus; it’s that the government itself has no major mission to carry it through the inevitable storms of parliamentary politics.
The Morrison government’s basic problem is actually the same one that characterised the Rudd-Gillard government. Apart from “more action” on climate change – which Kevin Rudd eventually squibbed and Julia Gillard turned into the electorally disastrous carbon tax – what was the point of …
Politicians must judge how much voters will sacrifice to achieve lower emissions.
ROSS FITZGERALD
In recent days, climate change policy has divided the Nationals as much as it divides the Liberals.
But the question “Do you believe in climate change?” is a curious one because it suggests that change in climate is not a matter of fact but a matter of faith.
The recent bushfire disasters in Australia have been taken by many to confirm that the climate is indeed changing and have prompted more urgent demands that the government do much more to …
