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 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

 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 …