ROSS FITZGERALD
High-risk gambling and high-risk drinking overlap greatly.
  The distribution of consumption is very similar, with a minority of consumers accounting for most of the demand.Plusthere is a huge over-representation of vulnerable groups in those addicted to gambling and to alcohol.
 The enormous social costs of gambling in Australia are still not fully understood.
 But many studies accurately demonstrate that gambling imposes a heavy burden, especially on low-income groups and some ethnic populations. They and their families not only lose loved ones from suicide but many families and relationships are destroyed by …

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 …

My Last Drink, 32 Stories of Recovering Alcoholics
Edited by Ross Fitzgerald and Neal Price
Connor Court, 2022, 189 pages, $29.95
Reviewed by Matthew White
One does tire of celebrity reprobates. A fast way to attract attention and build a ‘profile’ in our lazy society is to write about one’s appalling behaviour towards others. Its acceptability enables a form of confession and avoidance, and, if properly promoted and garnished with a veneer of bohemianism, it is more like confession and appointment to the firmament of New Ideaidolatry. Attention, advertisement, writers’ festivals, prizes, perhaps even honours, …

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 …

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

In this 7th book of the highly acclaimed Grafton Everest Series, our indolent hero, Professor Dr Everest, former lecturer in Lifestyles and Wellbeing at the University of Mangoland, is surprised to find himself President of the newly minted Republic of Australia. He is also concerned when he learns that, due to a drafting error, it is to be an American-style executive presidency. Luckily he manages to avoid any actual work or duties, save heading the newly created Department of Wellbeing, and leaves on a goodwill tour of the United States.
Here, …

The PM navigated a tricky path to election victory. Now he must turn his attention to nailing his agenda.
BY ROSS FITZGERALD
Scott Morrison’s “quiet Australians”, like Sir Robert Menzies’ “forgotten people” and John Howard’s “battlers”, were the key to the federal election win and are at the heart of the Liberals’ electoral success. These “quiet Australians” are the people who preferred a Liberal government that had rolled two elected PMs to a Labor Party that was promising to steal their savings, increase their rent, reduce the …

by ROSS FITZGERALD

It’s depressing isn’t it?

Whatever the result of this election, Australia’s dismal decade of mediocre-to-poor government is likely to continue. Our economy is stagnating and our strategic environment is deteriorating. Yet none of what’s being offered by either side will make it significantly better and much will make it seriously worse. We have to have a government after tomorrow, and by a fair margin the Coalition one is preferable to the Labor alternative, but neither outcome will arrest what is becoming a period of long-term drift and decline.

By the …