Ross Fitzgerald was born on Christmas Day in 1944. His elder brother Rodney had died in his father’s arms on the way to the hospital in 1942 when he was only six months old. From his parents, Fitzgerald inherited low self-esteem and an aversion to funerals. His toxic relationship with them fostered in him a fear of life itself. At fourteen, Fitzgerald started to drink. Although for the most part, he appeared to function through school, through university and through life, he was, in fact, functioning at the most superficial level possible. Fitzgerald had become an alcoholic. In his memoir, My Name is Ross: An alcoholic’s journey, he shares his fears, experiences, loves and losses with the reader with a frankness that is disarming as well as inspiring.

Ross Fitzgerald was not a stereotypical, bottle-in-a-brown-paper-bag, snoring-on-a-park-bench alcoholic. As he carefully describes, alcoholism can take many forms but all of them are destructive: emotionally, professionally, socially, physically and psychologically. Fitzgerald functioned sufficiently well in society to achieve many admirable things and meet many notable people. Inside however, he was not functioning at all. His story tells of his struggle with alcohol and the profound effect it had on his and other people’s lives. When he gave up alcohol entirely, this did not prove to be the end of his story.

Narrated in the first person, Fitzgerald takes the reader on his journey with him. To anyone who has known or been an alcoholic, his story resonates with a realism that is disturbing and, at times, distressing. He has not spared himself, his actions or their consequences, but speaks of them with a disarming honesty and pragmatism. He tells in great detail of his descent into alcoholism, the warnings against drinking by friends, his estrangement from family and those same friends, and finally, his acknowledgement of his problem and first trip to AA.

Written in a chronological order of events, Fitzgerald provides enormous insight into life after alcoholism. The challenges, the passion to help others and the difficulties of his work life, whereby he was forced to socialise and network. These events always include alcohol, as it is embedded in Australian culture as a relaxation and relationship building tool. Fitzgerald has become an outsider because of his decision not to drink, because we live in a society where non-drinkers are viewed with suspicion and, at worst, ostracised.

This book generates empathy towards the alcoholic. It provides an explanation as to why people may drink, how difficult stopping is, the irreparable damage it does to relationships (both personal and professional), why people need to want to stop themselves, and how AA is so valuable to people as a support network as it does not judge. The tragedy is so many people do judge, forcing most alcoholics to find refuge in the numbness of their addiction.

Fitzgerald has literally bared his soul in this frank and fearless account of his life as an alcoholic. No one could do otherwise than congratulate him on his courage to put pen to paper and expose the most intimate parts of his life in order to help others understand the problem of alcoholism in a society that venerates alcohol to the point of obsession.
Reviewed by Danielle Mulholland

Brisbane News 14 July 2010

The man behind the faceless men
ALAN “THE RED FOX” REID: PRESSMAN PAR EXCELLENCE
BY ROSS FITZGERALD AND STEPHEN HOLT
UNSW PRESS, RRP $49.95
Australian national politics often seems to be a blood sport. A celebrated example is the recent championship bout between K. Rudd and J. Gillard. It started around dinnertime one Wednesday and was over bar the shouting a few hours later.
For anyone interested in why we like our politics that way, this biography of the legendary political correspondent Alan Reid is worth a look.
Reid, born in Liverpool, was a nimble reporter who made a name for himself in the competitive Sydney newspaper world after the Depression.
In Canberra he made an art form of targeting everyone from Robert Menzies to Labor messiah Gough Whitlam.
Reid was best known for a scoop that led to the coining of the phrase “faceless men” to describe the ALP’s powerful factional leaders.
At one stage Alan Reid was probably the most feared journalist in the Packer empire.
Fitzgerald and Holt, both historians, have written a punchy, well-documented account of an influential career. Laurie Oakes’ brilliant foreword is a bonus.
Verdict: newsworthy

Russell Robinson, Herald Sun (Melbourne) Saturday July 24, 2010, Weekend BOOKS p 15

July 7, 2010

Most people erroneously think we are necessarily waiting for Brad Orgill to give us insights into the magnitude of the problem.

Interestingly, the Commonwealth Auditor-General asked school principals whether they thought they were getting value for money at their school, and fewer than half nationally were estimated to agree or strongly agree!

Below are the stratified-sample answers that fell into the remaining categories (p 192 http://www.anao.gov.au/uploads/documents/2009-10_Audit_Report_33.pdf)

The use of BER P21 money for my
school represents value for money.
[n = 610]

Neither Agree nor Disagree 16.8%
Disagree 16.1%
Strongly Disagree 12.8%
Don’t Know/Can’t Say 5.7%

The obvious question is where have problems been the worst.

The investigations undertaken by The Australian and the refusal of some public school principals in New South Wales particularly to be intimidated have made it clear that there have been some colossal BER rip-offs in that state. What about Queensland and Victoria?

That’s the sort of information one would have expected in a thorough assessment of principals’ views, even though the Commonwealth Auditor-General can’t inquire into state and territory instrumentalities’ activities.

Separate estimates for each of the public/Catholic/Independent sectors and then further ones about at least the biggest states (possibly collapsing some categories if sample numbers became too small) if, as expected from subsequent evidence, only the public systems stood out as unsatisfactory.

What do we instead find in the ANAO report at paragraphs 7.25 – 7.29 on pp 163-5?

In Figure 7.9 on p 164, only separate estimates mysteriously presented in terms of whether My school system/Education Authority or My school commissioned the design, even though a footnote on the previous page made it clear how different the public and Catholic sectors were in this regard! And there’s an apparent acceptance of the nonsense state bureaucracies tried to peddle about having higher standards. A rather timid whitewash, somewhat unusual for Auditors-General who tend to take their independence seriously.

Suitably spurred, now that principals’ views of dissatisfaction have been corroborated through some indicative average cost metrics, the Auditor-General could present much more useful summary material fairly quickly.

Indeed, after apologising for the earlier misjudgement, he could also undertake a closer examination of the full run of 2,300 replies from public schools to tentatively identify geographical regions in which problems appeared to be worst, or alternatively report roughly the same level of dissatisfaction uniformly throughout jurisdictions.

One wonders whether the Prime Minister’s charmed life in this monumental mismanagement will continue throughout the campaign, or whether the Gillard gloss will prove wanting under the first bit of methodical scrutiny.

ONE image that stands out in this book is a helicopter descending on the lawn of the nursing home where Alan Reid was dying in 1987: from it emerged the prime minister, Bob Hawke, who had come to pay his respects.

Even in extremis Reid liked to have a chat with the powerful, and in his heyday, from the 1950s to the ’70s, his nose for a story and ability to winkle out intrigue were without compare.

He was the man who brought Bob Santamaria out from anonymity and organised the famous photographs of Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam talking to Labor caucus members outside a Canberra hotel, the image that inspired Menzies’ famous and seemingly indelible gibe about the “faceless men” of the party; he played more than a merely reportorial role in the ouster of John Gorton.

“A competent but somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip,” he was loftily called by Paul Hasluck, whom Reid had claimed to know better than he did; Whitlam also hated him, and took him to court. But mostly he was liked and respected: as has been pointed out in the most recent issue of Overland, his influence can still be seen in the work of the Australian journalist and author, Paul Kelly, who also prides himself on his insider status and whose writing, like Reid’s, emphasises the personal dramas of politics.

The Age 17/07/2010

My daughter passed your book on to me, she has been through rehab for drug addiction & is now 8 months clean. She goes to NA meetings several nights a week & your book has inspired her to keep going. She quotes you often, as I now realise, especially that fact that you don’t necessarily like going to meetings, they are just part of life from now on.

My husband is also in recovery & your book is helping me enormously understanding the struggles he is going through. We’ve been married for 32 years & this has been the hardest period but I know now there are other people out there just like us.

I was fortunate to have been in at school in the days of religious instruction in a Methodist class when the minister brought in a woman from AA. Her standing up in front of a class of 13 year old girls saying “Hello my name is Ethel & I’m an alcoholic” had a profound effect on me & consequently I knew from that time that addiction was an illness.

Thank you for your honesty & humour. “Chair seeks table” still cracks me up!!

I usually counsel authors not to write angry letters in response to a bad review. But I feel compelled to respond to Richard Harding’s review of Ross Fitzgerald’s My Name is Ross: an alcoholic’s journey in your June issue. That it is the first negative review this very widely-reviewed book has attracted is neither here nor there; the critic is entitled to his opinion, although he doesn’t seem to be remotely familiar with the norms of autobiograpical writing, let alone the now well-established genre of addiction memoir. But because he berated the author for writing the book and the publisher for publishing it, I must respond.

Harding comments disdainfully that Ross Fitzgerald wanted the book to succeed commercially in Australia, so he may find it galling to learn that sales of the book have indeed been strong. What has been particularly gratifying however are the personal responses that Ross has received from colleagues, associates and strangers who have found his story moving and inspiring, often to the degree that they have started attending AA meetings or encouraged friends or family to do so. If Ross had written an abstract, dispassionate book rather than this brutally honest–if unflattering–self-portrait, its impact would have been limited. Finally, I have to point out to Mr Harding that the Damon Runyonesque names that he accuses the author of making up are all real nick names of real people. The organisation that is the hero of the book isn’t called Alcoholics Anonymous for nothing.

Yours sincerely

Phillipa McGuinness
Executive Publisher, UNSW Press/New South

Reviewed for The Walkley by David Salter

“Go for your life, sport.” That was my curt introduction to Alan Reid, the doyen of the Canberra press gallery. As a green young hack in the mid-1960s I’d tip-toed into the Daily Telegraph office in old Parliament House wanting to cadge some telex time to file my copy to Sydney. Reid was perched in his usual corner like a vulture in a rumpled suit, a roll-your-own durrie in his nicotine-stained fingers. It was a Saturday afternoon. All the politicians were back in their electorates, but The Red Fox was still hanging around, just in case. Either that, or he couldn’t stay away.

Reid was already a legend of Australian political reporting. In the 1950s he’d been the first to expose the activities of B.A.Santamaria and his ‘groupers’. In the 60s it was his ‘36 faceless men’ scoop that helped keep Menzies in power but also eventually allowed Whitlam to break the unions’ grip on parliamentary Labor. When I returned to Canberra a decade after my first meeting with Reid (to work for the ABC), he still commanded his favourite lookout spot in King’s Hall, and the same desk in the Telegraph office. More than any other gallery journalist, The Fox embodied both the history and standpoint of political reporting in Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt have now written an admirable account of Reid’s journalistic career. He was a notoriously private man who – perhaps wisely – culled many of his personal papers in retirement. But while the domestic details of his life are scant, this survey of his 50-year innings reporting federal politics is impressive. The book uses the great events of national affairs from 1930 to 1985 as its chronological framework, with Reid’s involvement as a reporter the constant sub-plot. What’s remarkable to learn is how often this esteemed journalist was prepared to sprint ahead of history’s footprint in an attempt to change its course.

Reid, like so many gallery tragics, was fascinated by power, not policy. (It’s no surprise that he named the alter-ego character in his unpublished novel about politics “Macker Kalley” – Machiavelli.) Almost everything he wrote, or later said on TV programs such as Meet the Press and Federal File, was concerned with leadership, threats to leadership and winning or losing elections. From the earliest days of his Canberra career with The Sun (1937-53), plots and conspiracies – indeed any form of conflict or melodrama – were his perennial themes. He was a tabloid man, through-and-through. Policy development and the legislative work of government rarely interested him, even as a commentator for The Bulletin in the last few years of his working life. For Reid, politics boiled down to who held power and who wanted to grab it from them – the rest was inconsequential fluff.

But despite his legendary status, he didn’t always get it right. Three times he was on the wrong side of major defamation actions prompted by damaging stories he could not substantiate sufficiently. At least twice he attracted the attention of the House Privileges Committee for breaches of parliamentary convention or confidence. And his habit of sometimes drawing an exceptionally long bow on the basis of unsourced quotes or information – and then splashing that speculation across the Telegraph front page – earned him a reputation for poisonous cunning. Paul Hasluck dismissed Reid as “a competent though somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip”, while Arthur Calwell called him “the lowest thing to crawl around this House”. (Reid was a good hater: he castigated Calwell at every opportunity for the next 20 years.)

At the centre of this book (although not specifically explored in any depth) is the most contentious issue of national affairs journalism: to what extent – if at all – should we tolerate the intrusion of a gallery correspondent’s personal views, or the interests of their proprietors?

Reid, almost every time he sat down at his typewriter, crossed what today would be recognised as the threshold where opinion begins to seep into straight political reporting. Fitzgerald and Holt document scores of occasions on which he not only wrote from a plainly biased standpoint, but actively inserted himself into events with the avowed intention of influencing their outcome.

So addicted was Reid to the processes of political power that for more than 40 years he acted as much as a participant, go-between and adviser – often even conspirator – as he did as a reporter. Yet despite his staunch and lifelong membership of the Australian Journalists’ Association it appears he never recognised the ethical obligation of disclosure in these situations. It was as if he believed the men’s club of Parliament House conferred on him a cloak of mutually-agreed invisibility.

Worse, at least to my mind, were the frequent occasions on which Reid took, and carried out, direct instructions from his Daily Telegraph proprietor, Frank Packer. These went well beyond the customary subtle indications from Head Office as to which policies or politicians might be favoured in tomorrow’s news report or column. Packer expected his man in Canberra to toe the company line unquestioningly, and often to take an active role in precipitating events (for instance, the undermining of Gorton’s prime ministership and ludicrous championing of Billy McMahon in his place).

The patient historical research of Fitzgerald and Holt confirms what any half-aware journalist of his period already knew: Reid pushed plenty of private agendas, but in the end he always did what he was told by Park Street. It’s disheartening that a man whose lifelong socialist sympathies were formed during the Depression (and often called his mates “comrade”) could have so comprehensively sold his soul to one of the most unprincipled buccaneers in Australian media history. As Laurie Oakes remarks in his judicious Foreword to this book, Reid “combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism”.

David Salter has been an independent print and television journalist for more than 40 years. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine.