Busy in the Fog is a wildly funny sexual-political romp which will amaze, delight, annoy and almost certainly offend. Grafton Everest is now at his wit’s end facing life in his gluttonous middle age. Forced to deal with unexpected changes in his wife Janet, their allegedly gifted child Lee-Anne, and in his supposedly academic place of work, Grafton passes through episodes of a spiralling, phobic anxiety, Ross Fitzgerald’s Queensland has more than its share of terrorists, religious ratbags, free enterprise maniacs and right and left-wing zealots.
“Utilising a lethal wit, Fitzgerald’s …

Ross Fitzgerald’s novel “Pushed from the Wings is a riotously funny black comedy set in Queensland, Australia. His teetotal hypochondriac hero, Grafton Everest, is destined to become an Australian legend: an Antipodean early middle-age mix of Walter Mitty, Billy Liar and Sandy Stone. An anti-hero of outrageous proportion. “Pushed from the Wings is now an eBook.

Ross Fitzgerald’s Erotic Novel of the Year is now available as an eBook. Drawing on classic themes of betrayal, death and metamorphosis, Ross Fitzgerald has created an enthralling contemporary mythology in Soaring.
This extraordinary novel moves between Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia, and Ireland, with its cast of flamboyant misfits playing out the eternal search for love and passion.
Rodney (hang-glider and merchant of erotica); Rebekah (19 year old Alcoholic’s Anonymous member, father unknown) ; and Michael (maverick motorcycling priest) are the three voices which speak powerfully, nakedly to us in Soaring.
SOARING is …

In Australia, nothing excites such passion as the tribal loyalties generated by Australian Rules football. Australia’s Game is a collection of essays and writings capturing the agony and the ecstasy of our great game from some of Australia’s best storytellers.
More than 50 contributors share their oval dreams in reflections ranging from witty and affectionate reminiscences and expressions of hope for the future, to statements of deep alienation and betrayal. Featured writers include Don Watson, Paul Kelly, Geoffrey Blainey, Gerald Murnane, Paul Daffey, John Harms, Emma Quayle, Barry Oakley, Peter Corris, …

THIS month in 1935 the world’s most successful self-help group, Alcoholics Anonymous, was founded in Akron, Ohio. As it happens, it was in Akron and in Cleveland, Ohio, that I did a lot of drinking myself in the 1960s.
I turn 69 on Christmas Day. And if I survive until Australia Day I will have had no alcohol or other drugs for 44 years. This means that, with the support of AA, I’ve had 44 more years on the planet than I would have had.

Like a lot of teenagers who are …

HOW lucky am I that I was born at a time when Alcoholics Anonymous was well and truly functioning in Australia.
AA began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, when alcoholic New York stockbroker Bill Wilson, fearful that he would resume drinking, sought out another alcoholic with whom to talk, namely a doctor, Bob Smith, who previous to their meeting could not stop drinking.
Soon the loosely knit fellowship of AA spread to Cleveland (where in the late 1960s I was hospitalised many times for alcoholism) and then throughout the US.

Australia was the …

ROSS Fitzgerald is one of Australia’s better known recovering alcoholics. He is Emeritus Professor of History and Politics at Griffith University and the author of 35 books, including his recent memoir My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.
My Name is Ross chronicles Professor Fitzgerald’s struggle with alcoholism and other drug addiction from the age of 14 until he stopped drinking and using other drugs at the age of 24. Since then, Professor Fitzgerald has been sober, drug free, and a member of Alcoholics Anonymous , a fellowship which he still …

IT is unusual for an historian to endorse an historical novel – but that is exactly what happened recently, when Ross Fitzgerald, Professor Emeritus of History at Griffith University, publicly endorsed Noel Beddoe’s novel The Yalda Crossing. Mark Colvin interviews both men, inquiring about the relationship between the Wiradjuri people and white settlers in and around the Murrumbidgee River.
Listen to the interview

QUEENSLAND politics has always had larger than life personalities.
From the National Party’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen to Labor’s Peter Beattie, the state has produced characters who have given its politics a national reputation for seldom being dull.
Now it is a one-time supporter of the “Joh for PM” campaign, which derailed a bid by John Howard to become prime minister, who is causing more than a ripple and embarrassing Tony Abbott and Queensland Liberal National Party Premier Campbell Newman.

The latest public outbursts of billionaire Clive Palmer have enlivened politics with a vigorous campaign …

COPING with a hung parliament is increasingly an unenjoyable experience for the federal government but it did not need to be so. The Prime Minister’s bleak prospects stand in sharp contrast to what happened under her great Labor predecessor, John Curtin, when he was in the same situation. The wartime parliament of 1940 to 1943, in which no one party had a majority, saw him gain office and wield power magnificently.
One point of contrast, in particular, is quite eerie. It is not widely known that Curtin’s task in removing Australia’s …

ROSS Fitzgerald is a well known journalist, historian and novelist (the Grafton Everest series). He is also a survivor of alcoholism, which led him to psychiatric wards, shock therapy, and suicide attempts. Alcoholics Anonymous not only gave him faith in the power to accept his condition, but the will to help others. AA is a community of people who have faith – in God, in humanity, in the power to overcome the weakest part of themselves.
Hear the interview with Ross Fitzgerald on ABC Radio, February 5, 2012
Click here to listen