I liked the bit about my dad (Bookmaker Jim)! He would have laughed too at that anecdote all over again.

I think that your book is a terrific read, and well constructed as a narrative. It was smart of you to write it in digestible chunks so that the reader can pick it up and put it down and pick it up again without having lost the thread of your story. It also allows the reader (me) to think about the little nuggets of insights you slotted away in your mini-stories within each chapter.

I also noticed that you sustained a swing of optimism all the way through your book, despite the horrific nature of some of the stories. I am still curious about what happened in your boyhood and teenage years especially with your mother Edna; you are skittish about the details there. I understand that instinct because I was similarly skittish about certain details in my own memoir of deafness. I decided that it was not necessary for the reader to know everything to get the gist of things.

I love that you are so open about your love for Lyndal and for Emily. I must admit that as a single woman, I envy that.

And finally, I got the impression that while you may have set about writing your book to explain alcoholism and AA to the “general reader”, the task of writing your very personal book also led you to a deeper and warmer understanding of yourself. It is as if the re-iteration in writing (as opposed to orally at AA Meetings) shone fresh light for you on old incidents and oft-stated wisdoms.

I am very pleased I read your book.

Donna

I fortuitously listened to your Radio National podcast today and was extremely moved by it. Struggling with alcoholism for 27 years myself and being on my 2nd day sober again, listening to your story gave me the strength I needed today[i also wept a lot]to stay sober until I get to the meeting I need to tonight.
I just want to say thank-you for telling your story and I’m looking forward to reading your book.

Yours sincerely,

Gynia

Do you have spiritual thoughts? Or do they drift away in a fog while you’re busy doing something else? ‘My Spiritual Diary’ is a monthly series on ‘The Spirit of Things’ where people in all walks of life keep a record of their spiritual thoughts and practice. Sharing their feelings and observations, they focus on the things that give meaning to their lives, in the day to day.

Ross Fitzgerald is a well known journalist, historian and novelist (the Grafton Everest series). He is also a survivor of alcoholism, which led him to psychiatric wards, shock therapy, and suicide attempts. Alcoholics Anonymous not only gave him faith in the power to accept his condition, but the will to help others. AA is a community of people who have faith – in God, in humanity, in the power to overcome the weakest part of themselves.

For ‘The Spirit of Things’, Ross has kept a Spiritual Diary from Christmas Day (his birthday) to Australia Day. Ross reads from his Spiritual Diary for the first of RN Summer programs, and in a conversation with Rachael Kohn, he reveals that there are some emotions that are still too raw to put into words.

(First broadcast 5 February 2012).

C2H5OH, or ethyl alcohol, is a clear, colourless, volatile and flammable oxygenated hydrocarbon produced by the fermentation of sugar that is used, among other things, in the preparation of beverages. It is also one of the oldest and most efficacious of psychoactive drugs – and we love it. Anecdotal evidence – and, for most of us, personal experience – leads to this conclusion; OECD figures (2008) confirm it. Australians over the age of fifteen consume an average of ten litres of pure alcohol per capita each year. This puts us in the mid-range of comparative countries, with Luxembourg (which is, incidentally, estimated by the World Bank in 2008 to be the world’s most affluent nation) way out in front with 15.5 litres. The National Health and Medical Council of Australia concludes that, while most Australians enjoy a drink for relaxation and enjoyment, a ‘substantial proportion of people drink at levels that increase their risk of alcohol-related harm’ (my emphasis).

To abstain from drinking is to be regarded with a certain suspicion, as if you are not quite trustworthy or, in the case of men, not masculine enough. The right to drink is sacrosanct. Along with the beach, the barbie and the football oval, alcohol is emblematic of the Australian way of life and an icon of our democracy. It is ubiquitous across lines of class, education, profession and gender. Walk down the red carpet at any gala corporate event and you will find a gauntlet of waiters bearing libations. In Kings Cross on a Saturday night you will see young girls sitting in the gutter, eyes glazed over, stiletto heels awry, mini-dresses stained with vomit. Out in suburbia, attend the average eighteenth birthday party and watch the guest of honour chug-a-lug vodka shots until the bottle is drained.

Alcohol is the world’s favourite drug – and in Australia, where it has long been identified as a social and a health issue, it is also a political problem.

In his memoir ‘My Name Is Ross’, Australian writer, academic and political commentator Ross Fitzgerald reveals that between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, he spent every Christmas Day in a mental hospital receiving treatment for alcoholism. Ironically, Christmas Day was also his birthday. Those nine years were a rampage of sexual promiscuity, violence, degradation, humiliation, drug abuse, shock therapy and deep self-loathing.

For Fitzgerald, even today, to drink is to die.

The relationship between writers and grog is, of course, long standing and full of legend. Baudelaire once said that Edgar Allan Poe used alcohol as a weapon ‘to kill something in himself, a worm that would not die’. Poe did his best to affirm the great poet’s observation by dying on the streets of Baltimore wearing someone else’s clothes, penniless and alcoholic.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously referred to alcohol as ‘the writer’s vice’, an observation supported by the work of Nancy J Andreasen, a professor of psychiatry who tracked the drinking habits of writers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop over fifteen years. Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Cheever, Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor were among her sample, in a study that found that 30 per cent of the writers were alcoholics, compared to 7 per cent of non-writers.

The critic Leslie Fiedler refers to the writer’s need for a ‘charismatic flaw’. What could be more convenient than the liquor cabinet? A high proportion of American recipients of the Nobel Prize for literature were alcoholics: Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway among them. John Steinbeck, Raymond Carver, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, Henry Melville, Jack London and many more resorted to the writer’s vice, whether to kill the worm or write the book or both.

By a stroke of good fortune, Ross Fitzgerald met a recovering alcoholic who steered him to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. For an atheist who once tried unsuccessfully to join the Communist Party but was rejected because of his taste for grog, the philosophical leap required to appeal a higher power could not have come easily.

Carl Jung, marginally influential in the establishment of AA in the 1930s, once observed that the craving for booze was ‘the equivalent, on a low level, of the spirited thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.’ Jung’s maxim for the alcoholic – spiritus contra spiritum, spirit against spirit, power against power – suggests that alcoholism is, in a sense, not so much a failure as the transference of the will, in which the worm takes control with a promise of psychological and, in extreme cases, physical obliteration.

E M Jellinek, one of the world’s best-known authorities on alcoholism, developed a typology that ranks alcohol dependence. In general, alcoholic writers from the English-speaking world, such as the young Ross Fitzgerald, fall into the gamma category, which is characterised by a capacity to abstain for periods between bouts of aggressive binge drinking. French writers, on the other hand, tend to the delta type, unable to abstain but able to control consumption.

In his fascinating book Alcohol and the Writer, Donald Goodwin profiles the Belgian author Georges Simenon who had the distinction of qualifying, at different periods, in both categories. Having never regarded himself as an alcoholic while living in France, his drinking habits changed when he moved to America, where he encountered a convivial and perpetually parched ‘freemasonry of alcoholics’ that drew him willingly into ‘manhattan after manhattan, dry martini after dry martini’.

The Australian obsession with alcohol disembarked from the First Fleet, with early settlers resorting to drunkenness as a means of ameliorating the blistering sun, poisonous critters, understandably hostile Indigenous inhabitants and the rule of the lash. In their useful and informative book ‘Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia’, Trevor Jordan and Ross Fitzgerald note that Australian political culture has long been closely associated with alcohol, as veterans of the Left might attest. The most obvious historical episode of alcohol-fuelled political upheaval was our only military coup, the so-called Rum Rebellion of 1808, in which the infamous NSW Corps overthrew Governor Bligh in retaliation for his attempts to rein in their power, which rested on the use of rum as a form of currency. Lesser known may be Gough Whitlam’s admission that had he been aware that Sir John Kerr had a chronic drinking problem – twice admitted to hospital to dry out while in office, according to Whitlam – he would not have recommended him for governor-general.

There is an unhealthy relationship between effort, reward and alcohol in Australian culture, perhaps rooted in our tainted colonial past and reflected in the methodologies used in the marketing of alcohol today. Over time, the once popular masculine ideals of the shearer, the drover and the digger were joined by the sportsman. By the 1950s, Australia had a subculture of pub art depicting square-jawed rugby players and cricketers on the walls of hotels across the country. The sweat of the worker morphed into the sweat of the sporting hero.

Today, multinational companies like Lion Nathan, Fosters and Diageo continue to exploit the entrenched relationship between sport and alcohol, contributing more than 80 per cent of the total amount of corporate sponsorship of sports-related enterprises. Meanwhile, alcohol kills at least 3000 people a year nationwide, causes more than 70 000 hospitalisations at a cost of $7.5 billion. A total ban on alcohol advertising could reduce drinking by 25 per cent, road fatalities by 30 per cent and the yearly social costs of alcohol abuse by several billion dollars. But the vodka in the fridge will freeze solid before we see that.

Alcohol abuse begets acts of a human being’s lower nature. As that great dishevelled chronicler of dipsomania Charles Bukowski puts it, ‘Sometimes you just have to piss in the sink.’ Compare, in an Australian context, the larrikin pranks of Julian O’Neil, one of rugby league’s most celebrated drunks, infamous for the ‘poo in a shoe’ episode at a regional motel while on tour – or, indeed, the numerous far more sinister incidents involving footballers, sexual assault and hush money.

For a country with, according to a 2004 survey in the Economist, the world’s highest rate of serious assaults, a reduction in operating hours in Australian pubs would seem long overdue. Licensing laws that favour increased access to hotels result, predictably, in increased harm. In 2008, 12 per cent of inner-city hotels in Sydney were responsible for 60 per cent of all assaults on hotel premises. In Newcastle, the figures were 8 and 80 per cent, respectively. The hotels in question operated under extended hours. By contrast, recent trials in which fourteen NSW pubs adopted earlier closing times led to a 30 per cent decrease in cases of street violence. But the Australian Hotels Association continues to behave like a latter-day Rum Corps. As social researcher Hugh Mackay points out, politicians of all persuasions continue to resist substantive change by deferring to complaints from the hotel industry ‘as if a dip in the profitability of hotels is a social issue on the same scale as street violence’.

Alcohol is a weapon, as Baudelaire said, and in Australia it is used to satisfy a self-destructive but lucrative compulsion.

By now you could be forgiven for thinking I was that most despised of characters, the wowser. You may well be right: I haven’t had a drink for six months and the self-righteousness of the reformed is notorious. I was never really a booze hound, more your two-glasses-of-wine-at-dinner-and-a-couple-of-beers-in-front-of-the-telly kind of drinker; by definition a ‘social drinker’, even when I was alone.

I stopped for two reasons: firstly, I had a very demanding year ahead and needed to be sound of body and mind; secondly, my children were in their teens and I realised that almost every adult member of their immediate family was a ‘social drinker’ – and some far more social than others. I wanted to lead by quiet example, to show that choice was possible, dissent from the norm an option.

An old bar room joke goes that you know you have a drinking problem when your doctor finds traces of blood in your alcohol stream. Perhaps in Australia today, that’s no longer quite so funny.

Read it and threw it away.

I have been sober 7 weeks and attend AA regularly – I think your book was definitely the catalyst to bringing me to AA

Paul
Yeppoon Qld

To an extent, this amazement persisted through my first reading. But, on returning to the book over the past few weeks, I have come to see how human your experience was. The initial downfall was in no way glamorous and the academic achievements were incidental. Your experience is, I believe, more universal than a talented young man gone awry. Furthermore, and this is where the book resonated for me, it is more than just a story of alcoholism. For me, and I hope I am not simply superimposing my own experiences, it is a story about alienation and detachment medicated, and dangerously so, with booze.

I’m a young man at the same age you reached your nadir. I share many of your enthusiasms – writing, books, Barry Humphries, a childhood of cricket – and could directly associate with many of your experiences. I’ve spent time laid out by depression and, like you write, been so wrought with anxiety I’ve been unable to read a newspaper being an ostensibly high-achieving student. Similarly, I could put myself in your shoes when you write of an inherent tendency, as a lost young man, of a shit-stirring that masks an uncertainty of identity: you acted as a philosopher among footballers and a footballer among queens. Your discussion of family and its lonely embrace, was also not unfamiliar.

I’ve previously wimped out when I’ve wanted to contact authors in the past, and you are indeed the first I’ve communicated with. I just wanted to say that I admire the determination that you summoned to resurrect yourself (when those closest to you had written you off), and I thank you for your story.

Carlin Hurdis

My father, who was incidentally a friend of Barry Humphries, never made it into the rooms and died an awful death at the age of 61 from cancer of the oesophagus. When I was young, Barry Humphries once spent a weekend at our place, and I now assume he was trying to 12th step my father, but to no avail. He tried AA once and hated it, possibly a result of his ultra Catholic upbringing and schooling and an aversion to anything pertaining to God.

A terrible shame, as he was quite a talented man, but who left the world without anything to show for his gifts.

I have been sober for 14 years and took to AA easily, but had a hiatus of some 6 years where I didn´t attend meetings. My spiritual condition was definitely taking a downturn and I felt pretty much back where I was before I gave up the booze. So back I went to the meetings and am feeling better day by day.

I am one of those who needs quite a bit of maintenance. Years of various therapies and lots of meetings.

I had started to take my sobriety pretty much for granted, and your book has reminded me that we are some of the very lucky few and have not been cured, rather given a daily reprieve.

And that even on those days which are troublesome and feel like a failure we are gradually getting better.

My AA groups are in Munich, Germany, where the fellowship is fairly small, but the spirit is the same as anywhere in the world.
I am grateful to be part of it and feel privileged to have been able to read your story.

Also loved “The Watcher on the Cast Iron Balcony”, which we studied in year 10 at school, many many moons ago!

Thanks for your book and keep coming back!

Simon Fordham

We had old friend Ross Fitzgerald to lunch at The Cage recently. He was staying in Ubud – he and his wife Lyndal Moor have been Bali visitors for 20 years or more and always stay in the attractively royal ambiance of the Pura Saraswati hotel right in the middle of town – and drove all the way down to the Bukit (and back) for a bite and chat. It takes a true friend to do that, given today’s traffic conditions.

Fitzgerald is a professor of history and author or co-author of 35 books, the most recent being ‘Fools’ Paradise’, a fictional rendition of political events in the Australian state of Queensland that was long in the making because when first written it was met with horror by publishers who didn’t want to be sued by the non-fictional moulds from which Fitzgerald formed his characters.

Among the several tales told over lunch – they mainly concerned mutual colleagues and friends – was one lovely little story. He had to get back to Ubud early because he was giving a talk to a group of Indonesians (only men and from Bali and Java chiefly) who had recognised that they were addicted to alcohol.

One of Fitzgerald’s books is ‘My Name is Ross’, the story of how he beat potentially lethal alcoholism. He hasn’t touched a drop in more than 40 years and still attends meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous regularly.

He was giving his talk, he said, because Indonesians here don’t attend AA meetings, or not in significant numbers, and the chap who organised the meeting got the idea from reading a review of Fitzgerald’s book written some time ago by none other than your diarist. It was in Another Newspaper.

We’re sure the talk went well. Fitzgerald is an amusing raconteur.

HECTOR’S DIARY Bali Advertiser, June 27, 2012

Barry Humphries is a man of many parts. I know him through one of his less famous ones: that of bibliophile and connoisseur of late nineteenth-century ‘decadent’ literature. On 18 March he announced the final call for what is his most famous part. Dame Edna, the world was told, would retire from the stage. Possums mourned.

There is a photograph of Humphries in ‘My Name Is Ross’, in propria persona, at the author’s wedding on 5 November 1976. Fitzgerald records the wedding present: a copy of the two-volume OED, with the wry inscription ‘For Lyndal and Ross. In case you ever have “words”.’

The fellow Melbournians had another bond between them. Fitzgerald (born in 1944) had been sober since 26 January 1970; Humphries, ten years his senior, since 31 December 1971. Both men credit AA with their ‘recovering’ (‘recovery’, for the faithful, is never achieved – only the ‘one day at a time’ journey towards it). Fitzgerald’s title begs the echo, heard from every participant at every AA meeting, ‘and I’m an alcoholic’. Barry and Ross, we apprehend – Fitzgerald is tactful as to details – drank together in their unregenerate years. Fitzgerald, as he tells us, was present at the creation of that other famous Humphries particle, Sir Les Patterson. The men were dining together. Humphries left the table for a moment (to ‘point Percy at the porcelain’, as Bazza McKenzie would say), and, a little later, the bespittled diplomat and piss-tank Sir Les lurched on stage for the first time. Like others Fitzgerald at first took Patterson for real. Both men were at the time only very recently sober. Sir Les, as Humphries says, ‘drinks for him’. He could drink for Australia. But he too, alas, has gone into retirement along with Edna and Bazza. The massage parlours of Bangkok will mourn.

The genre to which Fitzgerald’s book belongs is, in AA-speak, a ‘drunkalog’. As the founders of the fellowship, ‘Dr Bob’ and ‘Bill W’, momentously discovered in their pioneer meetings in Akron, Ohio in 1935, alcoholics can help each other back to sobriety by ‘sharing their stories’. The invention of the drunkalog preceded that of AA by twenty years with Jack London’s ‘alcoholic memoirs’, ‘John Barleycorn’. Drunkalogs are required to offer ‘unflinchingly’ honest testimony. But they must also entertain. No sermons and no tedium. Heroic exaggeration and gothic improbabilities are indulgently winked at so long as essential truths are observed. London, for example, describes drinking a workman’s bucket of beer aged five. Such episodes do not always stand up to forensic investigation, as luckless James Frey discovered when The Smoking Gun website started digging into the facts of his drunkalog, ‘A Million Little Pieces’. You can get away with outrageous bragging at the meeting – but not on live TV with Oprah.

Ross Fitzgerald was never what Australians call a ‘two pot screamer’. In the course of his twenty-year drinking career he over-indulged himself into multiple hospitalisations, ECTs (it has left his brain as riddled with holes as Swiss cheese) and jailings. Since he more than once, in his cups, took a knife to young ladies who ‘thwarted’ his desires, he is lucky not to be writing his drunkalog from behind bars (the metal kind).

It was, however, his bad luck to be a ‘coping’ alcoholic – one who could keep the show on the road while drinking ruinously. In his youth he was a gifted athlete and had he not devoted himself to the bottle rather than the bat, he could have had a career in first-class cricket. He was quick-witted and canny enough to land first-class degrees, scholarships, fellowships, and plum academic jobs. He invariably pissed them away, but found something as good elsewhere. He smoked fifty cigarettes a day ‘despite being an asthmatic’, and daily popped up to thirty barbiturates, all the while glugging enough to float the proverbial battleship.

Fitzgerald ended up in AA when he had nowhere else to go other than the closed ward, the prison, or the morgue. The first half of the book, chronicling that journey to the AA terminus, is, as drunkalogs go, top notch – in the ‘John Barleycorn’ class. I wish I’d been around to hear him tell his story in person (he apparently still attends up to five meetings a week).

The presiding tone is laconic, verging on the blackly humorous, as in the following account of his initiation into AA when, as he puts it, he was never quite sure whether he wanted ‘a fuck or a haircut’:

“Lee took me, and a German bloke, to AA meetings almost every night for three months. During this time, the German bloke blew his head off with a double-barrel shotgun and I tried to kill myself twice by overdosing, which, not unnaturally, caused my parents great distress. ”

Having had four decades of sobriety to work it out Fitzgerald is shrewd on the central paradox of alcoholism: namely that it can be a life-saver as well as a life-destroyer. ‘The truth is’, he says,

“that if I hadn’t started drinking regularly at the age of fifteen, I almost certainly would have committed suicide by the time I was seventeen. But if I hadn’t stopped drinking and using other drugs at twenty-five, I wouldn’t have made twenty-six.”

Alcoholism, for those few who come out the other side, can be enriching as well as life-saving. There is an obvious impertinence in asking, but could Humphries’s art have reached the peaks that it did had he restricted himself to the statutory twenty-one units a week? Could sobriety have spawned Sir Les?

Things improved dramatically for Fitzgerald after he discovered, as Humphries puts it, that life is more stimulating without stimulants. And it lasts longer. The second half of ‘My Name Is Ross’ chronicles forty sober years. He won the hand of a former Australian Photographic Model of the Year, and they are still married. He ascended rungs of the academic profession, wrote well-received history books, and became an active participant in his country’s political life.

Drunkalogs, like good novels, should not waste space on the ‘happily ever after’. But even if it is less gripping a tale, the second half of the book has its interest. Fitzgerald nowadays worries about Australia’s drinking problem rather than his own. According to the government statistics as many as 14 per cent of the population indulge ‘riskily’. And the drinking age is plummeting. Most Australians now start drinking at fourteen. It’s a recipe for epidemic alcoholism.

What to do? Problem drinkers will tell you that raising the unit cost – as our government fatuously proposes – is not a solution. It’s a minor irritant. Most, when they are desperate, would rob a blind man’s hat if that was the only way they could get the next drink. Perhaps public flogging, as strict Muslims propose, would work. But it’s not an election winner. ‘Education’? It might work in the very long term, but the crisis is now.

Tireless advocate as he is for enlightened legislation Ross Fitzgerald is not, at heart, optimistic even about his beloved fellowship: ‘The truth is that even though AA is the most effective agency, not all that many alcoholics can stay off the booze.’ Cheers mate – but no cheers.

John Sutherland, THE LITERARY REVIEW, London, May 2012