Alcohol must stop being such an intrinsic part of Australian life if the wave of alcohol-fuelled violence is to be stopped, a leading expert in the field said yesterday.
Griffith University Emeritus Professor Ross Fitzgerald, a member of the NSW Government Expert Advisory Committee on Alcohol and other Drugs, has battled with alcohol addiction for most of his life.
Professor Fitzgerald has been sober for 40 years, with his last drink on Australia Day 1970.
“That means I’ve had 40 more years on the planet than I otherwise would have had,” he told …

Speech in response to Gerard Henderson’s launch of Ross Fitzgerald, My Name is Ross – An Alcoholic’s Journey (New South Books) 6pm Tuesday February 2, 2010, Clayton Utz Seminar Room, Level 30, 1 O’Connell Street Sydney.
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Thank you Gerard for a friendship that has lasted many, many years.
I remember once telling Gerard that I thought I was becoming more neurotic. To which Gerard replied. “That’s scarcely possible!”
I’d especially like to thank Nigel Marsh who suggested that I write a memoir with my alcoholism at its core; my Brisbane-based agent …

HERE I am, stretched out straight and still, enclosed in a tunnel, having an MRI brain scan at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney to find out why I’m bleeding from the brain in four places.
The only way I can survive the 25-minute claustrophobic ordeal is to wear a sleeping mask and recite, like a mantra, the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”
My situation brings back deeply buried memories of …

MANY great writers were alcoholics. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, James Joyce and Henry Lawson are but a few from a very long list. Shakespeare’s drinking habits are not known, but several of his most memorable characters put away plenty of grog. The Porter in Macbeth, severely hungover, pronounces to his aristocratic betters that drink is a great provoker of three things . . . nosepainting, sleep and urine.
For Ross Fitzgerald, those three afflictions must have seemed relatively trivial. Starting at the age of 15, he drank for …

IT would be easy to fill every shelf in a bookshop with books published on, for, about and by alcoholics. A quick search online reveals thousands of books on alcoholism, from self-help to the confessional, and everything in between.
Australia is a nation whose identity, for better or worse, rests squarely on the consumption of alcohol. It is part of our social fabric and always has been. Captain James Cook took beer with him on the Endeavour and the first settlers brought beer with them in 1788. Our first prime minister …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Father Peter Kennedy had hundreds of followers and his church, St Mary’s at South Brisbane, was a beacon of enlightened thinking. What business would close down such a successful franchise?
Yet Fr Kennedy’s licence to exercise the rights of priestly office has been revoked and his followers face the possibility of excommunication. Kennedy has been banned from conducting services as a Roman Catholic priest anywhere in the world, while his sidekick, Terry Fitzpatrick, has been banned from being active as a priest in the Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane.
Despite this, almost all …