Ross Fitzgerald, Di Young & Tim Olsen speak about My Last Drink at The Sydney Institute
Professor Ross Fitzgerald is proud to say that he has been sober for over fifty years. Thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and the support he found among its members. As a prolific author, Ross Fitzgerald has again taken up the subject of recovered alcoholism in a new book My Last Drink, co-edited with Neal Price, an artist and writer who now lives in Hobart, Tasmania. The book brings together the stories of 32 recovering alcoholics and …

              Semut wins the 2022 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Australian History
The prize for Australian history went to Semut : The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo, by Christine Helliwell, who has worked and at times lived among the Borneo’s indigenous Dayak peoples for more than 40 years. In his review for The Australian’s Book pages, critic Ross Fitzgerald described the book as “brilliant.”
“Some Dayaks previously had never encountered Europeans, while most Allied soldiers previously had never met indigenous people,” Fitzgerald …

WHEN ONE DRINK IS ONE TOO MANY

The Sydney Institute Review of Books, Summer Reading, December 2022.

My Last Drink: 32 stories of recovering alcoholics
Ross Fitzgerald and Neal Price (eds)
Connor Court Publishing, Queensland, 2022
ISBN:9781922815224, RRP: $29.95
My Last Drink is also available from Amazon and Booktopia
Reviewed by Alan Gregory

This is a grim, but often highly entertaining, read as 32 recovering alcoholics tell the story of how they survived alcoholism. All contributors to My Last Drink accept the dictum that once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. This is despite the fact that many of the authors have …

The First Labor Government in the World proved a week was a long time in politics
by ROSS FITZGERALD
Queensland has had many political firsts. These include the fact that Australia’s only Communist Party MP, Frederick Woolnough (“Fred”) Paterson, was a two-term member of the Queensland Legislative Assembly.

Widely known throughout Queensland as “The People’s Champion”, Paterson represented the state seat of Bowen for the Communist Party of Australia from 1944 to 1950. This was until his electorate was gerrymandered out of existence by the state Labor government.
On St Patrick’s Day 1948, during …