LIKE many journalists of his generation, Alan Reid ached to write a novel. He wasn’t thinking of something twee and literary, something that might be praised for its light touches and teasing ambiguities. He envisioned a roman a clef about contemporary political life, blunt and boisterous, the whiff of the abattoir strong in the nostrils, something that would get people talking and cash registers tinkling, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory had done a few years earlier. It would be loaded with conspiracies. It had to be. Reid loved a …

A PHALANX of press gallery veterans is expected to turn out next week to the launch of Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s biography of Alan “The Red Fox” Reid. The doyen of the Canberra press gallery during the Menzies era, Reid set new boundaries in political journalism, becoming a player as much as a reporter. He organised the photo that led to Menzies coining the phrase “36 faceless men” to describe the 36 Labor delegates who dictated the party’s policies to the exclusion of party leadership in 1963. His standing …

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.
The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.
In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.
The …

A BIOGRAPHY of Canberra press gallery journalist Alan “The Red Fox” Reid, by The Australian’s resident professor Ross Fitzgerald and co-author Stephen Holt will be launched by the longest serving NSW Labor premier, Bob Carr, on June 8.
The book reveals the story behind the 1963 photographs of Arthur Calwell and his deputy Gough Whitlam that so superbly illustrated the long-held idea that Labor Party policy was set not by the leadership but by the party’s unelected “faceless men”.
For those who do not know the story, in 1963 the Labor Party …

Dr H. V. Evatt, who led the federal Australian Labor Party from 1951 to 1960, had  been a high-profile world figure during World War II and had served a term as an early president of the United Nations General Assembly.
Doc Evatt, notoriously, was a disastrous leader , the great Labor split of the 1950s occurred on his watch , but what is less known is that his political career was in difficulties even before he became leader. These difficulties arose from his failure to reconcile the competing demands of global diplomacy …

JUST before his ministerial responsibilities were significantly reduced, Peter Garrett made one of Australia’s great political understatements.
The former Midnight Oil frontman said of Labor’s insulation program: “We’re seeing a relatively small number of complaints in the system, given the scale of the system, about 0.5 per cent of complaints given the totality of the system. It has been a very successful program . . .” Two weeks later he was demoted and the program was cancelled.
As Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne pointed out last week, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd …

WHEN he was 14 and dressed in his school uniform, Ross Fitzgerald stood in the public bar of a Melbourne pub and at 11am ordered a brandy, lime and soda. The barman suggested he take off his hat. And so began the alcoholic life of an eminent Australian academic who, until he joined AA, spent every Christmas Day in a mental hospital between the ages of 16 and 25.
“I was so enclosed and enmeshed in myself”, he writes, “that I virtually didn’t see anything outside”.
Sober for 40 years, Dr Fitzgerald …

“The truth is that, quite often, a little bit of me goes a long way, Ross Fitzgerald writes towards the end of My Name is Ross. It is a characteristically disarming observation. Fortunately he stopped drinking forty years ago. But this account of his years of drinking and pill-popping nonetheless fills a substantial volume. And a harrowing account it is. But, again characteristically, it is relieved with wit and verve.
The temptation, and Fitzgerald is clearly not one readily to refuse temptation, must have been to present this as a …

Ross Fitzgerald is today a prolific writer; a distinguished historian and a well-known public figure. He is also an alcoholic.
At the age of 25 he was a broken man who, in a few short years, had gone from being an honours graduate from Sydney University to a man who, after many admissions to mental hospitals, living on what few wits remained to him, and having exhausted the patience of his many friends, had reached the nadir of his life with death closing fast upon him.
Last year he celebrated …

ROSS Fitzgerald hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since November 1969. But alcohol has been the defining influence on his life. He began drinking as a 14-year-old (the barman suggested he take off his school hat when he asked for a brandy, lime and soda) and spent much of the next decade drunk.
Fitzgerald says he drank to pretend he wasn’t afraid and because of a difficult relationship with his mother and his genetic predisposition to addiction.
In person, he seems to inspire active like or dislike; in words, he …

CAN someone who hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol for 40 years still be considered an alcoholic? Ross Fitzgerald certainly thinks so, and his searingly honest memoir does an excellent job of explaining that rather odd-sounding perspective.
It must have taken a lot of guts for a well-known political commentator and academic like Fitzgerald to write such a brutal account of his struggle with alcohol.
The first chapters of the book, dealing with a decade-long bender that he began at the age of 14 , are the toughest to read – not …