ROSS FITZGERALD, emeritus professor and author.
Fiona ­Patten’s ‘Sex, Drugs and the Electoral Roll’ (Allen & Unwin) is the most provocative memoir yet written by a sitting member of an Australian parliament.
The book opens with Patten’s maiden speech in the Victorian Legislative Council in February 2015, where she declared: “I may be the first former sex worker to be elected to a parliament anywhere in this country.” And then, after a short pause: “However, I am sure the clients of sex workers have been elected in far greater numbers before …

Ross Fitzgerald is the author of 40 books, most recently ‘So Far, So Good’, co-written with Antony Funnell and published by Hybrid.
THE KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE
While attending St Mark’s Anglican Church in Brighton in Melbourne in the 1950s, I started reading ‘The King James Version of the Bible.’ This inspiring translation had a huge impact on my appreciation of the wonders of the English language and the possibilities of reading and writing about history. Although I have been a devout atheist for decades, reading the King James Bible …

by ROSS FITZGERALD
Is former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull a wronged hero, as he obviously thinks he is? Was he a brilliant businessman who never really made the transition to politics, as some of his erstwhile admirers think? Or was he a dud who would have been better off in the Australian Labor Party, as some conservative Liberals think?
Right now, almost everyone has an opinion about our 29th prime minister but, as time passes, it will be the facts that shape history’s judgments. Here’s my stab at how history will …

by Kate Legge
I was interstate when my elderly neighbour Sid rang. Fire, burglary or dead cat immediately crossed my mind. “There’s a guy looking for you,” Sid informed me with a paternal air. “He reckons he did some work on your house 13 years ago. Says he overcharged you. He’s left his number.” We both wondered at an ulterior motive. Who owns up to financial deceit more than a decade after the fact, unless they’ve been dragged before a royal commission?
The algorithms in my brain began wheezing like an early-model …

by Ross Fitzgerald
Stephen Harper, the former Canadian conservative prime minister, has been in Australia talking about politics and leadership in the age of disruption. Harper is the first senior political practi­tioner, as opposed to commentator, who has tried to make sense of where the conservative side of politics is headed in the age of Donald Trump and Brexit.
For eight years, until 2015, Harper ran an orthodox centre-right government cutting taxes, balancing budgets, signing free trade deals and maintaining high immigration. But he accepts that this won’t work any more. …

Professor Dr Grafton Everest’s latest outrageous entertainment takes us to London and New York after a series of hilarious meanderings in the land of Oz.
So Far, So Good centres on our hapless professor’s obsession with food and fame; his relationship with his increasingly independent wife Janet; their wayward (and soon to be married) daughter Lee-Anne; and his much-loved terrier Maddie.
This cleverly plotted satire exposes the sad state of universities and of what now passes for politics in the West. Our obsession with technology, our fear of outsiders and our distrust …

As the thirty-seven contributions about the most heartfelt moments in VFL/AFL demonstrate, Aussie Rules football cuts across all divides. Hence this book of original essays includes contributions by and about football players, supporters and administrators who are vastly different in religion, class, income, ethnicity, gender, race and sexual preference.
The contributors within range from committed Christians such as Cardinal George Pell, Geraldine Doogue, and John Birt to devout atheists and like myself, Dick Whitaker and Barry Dickins.
Contributors to this collection of fine writing about heartfelt moments in Aussie Rules football also …

The long awaited football tragic’s Heartfelt Moments in Australian Rules Football edited by Ross Fitzgerald and featuring 37 authors has been launched in Melbourne.
It was launched in the heart of Blues territory at Carlton’s Il Gambero on the Park.
One of the authors is Cardinal George Pell. His Eminence, it should be remembered, signed to play for Richmond in his final year of school in 1959. As Pell writes in the book: “I was promised a place on their training list and financial help to attend Melbourne University.
Alas, seminary life made …

Bumbling Mangoland academic, Professor Dr Grafton Everest, has been elected to the Australian Senate, without really knowing why, and due to the influx of weird independents, finds himself holding the balance of power. Despite this, his personal life is a train wreck. A prostatectomy has left him impotent, his daughter is staging a theatrical event with an outlaw motorcycle gang and he suspects his wife is planning to have him put to sleep. On top of it all, Australia is facing natural disaster from Tectonic Change. Can Grafton save his …

WHEN I heard GoPro was releasing a harness for dogs I was curious. Could dogcam vision be as riveting as hang-gliding action, mountain biking, rock scaling or clips of catching that big wave?
So I harnessed up our favourite local dog, a West Highland White Terrier called Maddie who attends a weekly dog obedience class in inner Sydney.
She wore a regular GoPro Hero3+ black edition camera for the exercise — the same one used by extreme sports nuts.
Maddie just fits the weight range of dogs GoPro says the harness is suited …

Dame Marie Bashir, Governor of New South Wales, awards me a Member of the Order of Australia at Government House, Sydney, on September 3, 2014. I was appointed Member (AM) in the General Division of the Order of Australia, for significant service to education in the field of politics and history as an academic, and to community and public health organisations.