HIS name is Ross and he’s an alcoholic. Don’t blame me. He outed himself in his own book. He can thank the Almighty God that no one reads any more or everyone will be pointing at him. On the other hand he has no one to blame but himself. He doesn’t even believe in God so he adds “Please” before the Serenity Prayer so it goes “Please God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to …

‘My Name Is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey’ is more than just a memoir. As Ross Fitzgerald makes clear, this is a book with a message. It can be located at the end of Chapter 10 where the author writes that one of the functions of this work is to reinforce this simple message , that “an alcoholic is a sick person who can recover, not a bad person who needs to get good, or a weak person who needs to be strong.
Later on, Professor Fitzgerald comments that “alcoholism is …

Ross Fitzgerald has plenty to write about in this memoir. He is the author of 32 published books, a broadcaster, film producer, columnist, academic, outspoken opponent of Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen regime, political commentator and current and past member of numerous bodies ranging from the NSW State Parole Authority to the NSW Heritage Council. He is also a fellow book reviewer for the Herald, although it should be pointed out that we have never met.
Despite these achievements, it is immediately obvious that the defining characteristic of Fitzgerald’s life is that he …

Review by Peter Beattie, Former Premier of Queensland, Australia
The raw honesty of “My name is Ross: An Alcoholics Journey is compelling, confrontational and breathtaking . To reveal so much of himself in such candor show Professor Fitzgerald was deadly serious in his stated aim to help and encourage other alcoholics in their struggle with the demon drink.
Few well-known authors would have had the guts to write such a book .
By a third of the way through this painful journey I felt compelled to offer a silent prayer of thanks …

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 …

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 …

The increasingly shrill debate over the proposal to allow the parallel importation of books is the Australian chattering classes’ latest ideological battle.
Ever since the Rudd government’s Productivity Commission handed down a report that suggested lifting the current Parallel Importation Restriction (PIR), the literary cultural warriors have been manning the barricades to defend the protected Australian publishing industry.
The usual suspects: Tim Winton, Tom Keneally and other left-leaning authors have been loudly proclaiming that allowing normal competition to rule the local market would sound the death knell for Australian literature.
But the key …

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 …

In The Best Australian Essays 2008, David Marr presents 31 offerings, including a piece by himself — supposedly because ‘the publishers insisted’ and he ‘didn’t fight’!
Not unsurprisingly the result is a curate’s egg, although it does seem clear that a disproportionate number of essays hail from the Monthly, which like this book is published by Morry Schwartz’s Melbourne-based Black Inc. This means that much of this volume is intellectually inbred.
But enough carping, let’s deal with some of the positives.
Two of the most promising pieces in the collection are ‘To Hell …