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, …

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 …

PROF. ROSS FITZGERALD AM
Melbourne High School EXIT 1961
Ross Fitzgerald has recently published his 39th book “Heartfelt Moments in Australian Rules Football”.
Ross lives in Redfern, Sydney with his wife, Lyndal Moor Fitzgerald.
Published by Connor Court, HEARTFELT MOMENTS is a collection of 37 original essays about Aussie Rules. including a piece by Ross entitled “The Death and Life of Darren Millane”.
The book can be purchased at:
http://www.connorcourt.com/catalog1/index. php?main_page=product_info&products_id=363#.
MHSOBA Newsletter, December 2016

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 …

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.

From his first drink at the age of fourteen Ross Fitzgerald has struggled with alcoholism. His story is one of despair, courage and hope – and living to see another day.
He writes about growing up in Melbourne, drinking his way through university in Australia and the US, being incarcerated and subjected to electric shock therapy and reaching rock bottom before being saved by Alcoholics Anonymous.

One of Australia’s most widely-published historians, his story is truly inspiring. Insightful and brutally honest, “My Name is Ross” is his account of life as an …

More than half a century ago, the Catholic Church set out to take over Australian political life. The Church set up an underground organization to infiltrate political parties, to control their agenda, and to assume the leadership of their personnel. With church money, church facilities, and church authority, the organization had some noticeable successes. By 1952 it felt able to report that within a few years, Australian governments, federal and state, would be legislating its policies.
If this sounds shocking today, one should reflect that in a democracy it is legitimate …

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 …