IN August 1806 the newly appointed governor of NSW, William Bligh – he of Mutiny on the Bounty fame – made a tour of the Hawkesbury district.
He found to his dismay that “a pernicious fondness for spiritous liquors was gaining ground, to the destruction of public morals and happiness”.
Bligh’s concerns were shared by his superiors in Britain, the local clergy and many industrious free settlers throughout the colony. Soon afterwards, Bligh introduced tough measures to address the problem, including a total ban on distilling.
The …

Alcohol abuse and misuse is increasing “exponentially”, with the number of young women indulging in binge drinking increasing by 200 per cent since 2000, the co-author of a new book on the role of alcohol in Australia warns.
Speaking at the launch of Under the Influence at Annandale Galleries, in Sydney’s inner west on Wednesday night, co-author Professor Ross Fitzgerald referred to a finding by NSW police commissioner Andrew Scipione that a violent city like Los Angeles has fewer alcohol-related assaults than Newcastle and Sydney.
“Faced with the reality that tens of …

This evening I’d especially like to welcome Professor Gail Crossley from the Australian Catholic University, where I am proud to be a Professorial Fellow at the North Sydney campus.
As I was listening to the news of John Della Bosca’s resignation as Health Minister, yesterday I walked into South Sydney library to borrow my favourite P.G Wodehouse novel, ‘Love Among the Chickens’. As I stood in a queue, I overheard a young woman say to a friend, “I’ve just finished reading ‘Under The Influence’.
When her friend asked, “What’s it like? my …

FOR most of European history, the social effects of drunkenness were widely perceived as a problem and the individual drinker was seen as the source of that problem.
Before the 19th century, what is most notable about responses to excessive drinking is its perceived connection with licentiousness, sinfulness and crime. English laws against drunkenness enacted in 1552 and in 1606 repressed what was seen at the time as “the odious and loathsome sin of drunkenness”.
Problem drinking and alcohol-related harms hinted at moral defects in individuals, so remedies focused on punishing sinful …

Although my mother was an atheist and my father a lapsed Catholic, as a child at home living in the petite bourgeois Melbourne suburb of East Brighton, before our main meal, which during the week we called “tea and which started at exactly 5pm, we always said “grace.
These days, over 60 years later, I still think saying grace is a good idea. This is in part because there is a lot to be said for gratitude , about being alive for starters and for being able to eat a nourishing …

SOME of Australia’s most successful politicians have come back from opinion poll ratings as dismal as Malcolm Turnbull’s.
Jeff Kennett was an opinion poll cellar-dweller for much of his time as Victorian opposition leader, and John Howard woke up one morning to a 1989 Bulletin magazine cover: “Mr 18 per cent. Why does this man bother?” Both Kennett and Howard, however, needed a second stint as opposition leader to hit their straps, and it’s unlikely that Turnbull would stay in the parliament unless he came far closer to winning next year’s …

JULIA Gillard is the darling of the Canberra press gallery. This makes some sense: she is erudite and sometimes funny in question time, a welcome break from the tedium of our Prime Minister’s mangled bureaucratese. She is also “the woman most likely”, a potential female prime minister in a city obsessed with the symbolism of such potential.
But increasingly concerns are growing in the education sector that she may be out of her depth when it comes to delivering in her very large portfolio areas. On last week’s Q&A program on …

(Friday May 30, 2008) Many thanks for that kind introduction Michael. In fact, I am just finishing book number 30 , a history of alcohol in Australia, entitled A Nation Under the Influence.
Just before I hopped on the plane, my wife Lyndal reminded me of a scathing review of my work written by one of mine many enemies in Queensland. This devastating attack concluded, “Ross Fitzgerald is one of Australia’s most prolific, yet least read, authors.”
The sad fact is that, in many ways, …

REFORMIST and modernising are not words usually associated with the Queensland Nationals, an organisation often still associated with the excesses of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era, writes Ross Fitzgerald.
Yet in guiding the push to merge the state Nationals and the Liberal Party, Queensland Nationals leader Lawrence Springborg is proving to be a reformer and moderniser of non-Labor politics at a state and, possibly, a national level.
Unlike the rest of Australia, in Queensland the Nationals remain the dominant partner in the Coalition by a ratio of two to one, with the Liberals …