The Sydney Institute,

On 2 February 2010, Gerard Henderson, Executive Director of The Sydney Institute, will launch the memoirs of Ross Fitzgerald: My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey.

“I turn 65 on Christmas Day 2009. If I survive, I’ll be 40 years sober. This means that I have had 40 more years on this planet than I otherwise would have had if I hadn’t stopped drinking alcohol.”

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. Insightful and brutally honest, “My Name is Ross” is his account of life as an alcoholic and his battle to get sober and stay sober.

Ross Fitzgerald is a writer, broadcaster, historian and political commentator. He writes a regular column for The Australian and The Spectator Australia, reviews for the Sydney Morning Herald and The Weekend Australian and regularly appears on ABC Radio, ABCTV, and Channel 7. He is a member of the NSW State Parole Authority; the NSW Heritage Council; the Administrative Decisions Tribunal; and the NSW Government Expert Advisory Group on Drugs and Alcohol. Emeritus Professor in History and Politics at Griffith University and part-time Professorial Fellow at the Australian Catholic University, Ross Fitzgerald has published thirty-two books, including Under the Influence: Alcohol in Australia (2009), Made in Queensland: A New History (2009), coedited Growing Old (Dis) Gracefully (2008), The Federation Mirror: Queensland 1901-2001 (2002), Seven Days to Remember: The World's First Labour Government (1999), and Red Ted: The Life of E.G. Theodore (1994). He is married to Lyndal Moor with whom he has a daughter, Emily.

Bendable Learnings by Don Watson

Mission statements are everywhere: you have to have one, whether you're a Fortune 500 company, a hedge fund, a primary school, a church or a hockey club. Without a mission statement, who would know what your values are, or what your culture is? And how then, going forward, will you get buy-in on your strategy and uptake of your brand? The language of modern management has triumphed, transforming clear, everyday communication into meaningless sludge. To sound professional, you must express everything in abstract nouns, and each noun in terms of another one; you must talk about synergy and strategy, uptake and outcomes and outputs and inputs, key performance indicators and drivers and customer experience - even if your 'customers' are in fact patients in your hospital. This language is deliberately obscure and falsely scientific; what is more worrying, those who use it have lost the very ability to think clearly. From Don Watson, the author of Death Sentence and Weasel Words, comes this new assortment of noxious management drivel and financial market blather. Read them aloud - then try the exercises. The disease may not yet have run its course, but Watson's acerbic wit restores hope in the power of well-chosen words to entertain and to inspire.

Ransom by David Malouf

With learning worn lightly and in his own lyrical language, David Malouf retells Homer's Iliad. Focusing on the unbreakable bonds between men - Priam and Hector, Patroclus and Achilles, Priam and the cart driver hired to retrieve Hector's body. Pride, grief, brutality, love and neighbourliness are explored. And, this retelling has a few surprises. The minute you finish this novel you will want to return to the beginning and start all over again.

Macquarie Dictionary by

This fifth edition of the Macquarie, measuring a new awareness of environment and fragility, will mark a turning of the tide in our consciousness, in the span of our response, in the way we give voice to place – and place to voice. (Her Excellency Ms Quentin Bryce, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia) Since the Macquarie Dictionary was first published in 1981, its reputation as Australia's national dictionary has gone from strength to strength. It is now nationally and internationally regarded as the standard reference on Australian English. A comprehensive and up-to-date account of our variety of English, it not only includes all those words and senses peculiar to Australian English, but also those common to the whole English-speaking world.

Malcolm Fraser by Margaret Simons & Malcolm Fraser

Malcolm Fraser is one of the least known, most interesting and most misunderstood of Australia's Prime Ministers. In this book, part memoir and part authorised biography, Fraser, at the age of seventy- nine, explains himself and his record in government for the first time speaking from his experience to the present and the future.

2010 Annual Dinner

Simon Schama has written and presented more than 30 award winning documentaries on art and history for the BBC, including the 15-part A History of Britain. His most recent work is The American Future: A History, made for the BBC in the run-up to the 2008 US Presidential election.

He will speak to The Sydney Institute's Annual Dinner about "Obama and America".

A History of Britain by Simon Schama

Great Britain? What was that? asks Simon Schama at the start of this, the second of his three-volume journey into Britain's past. The answer unravels in The Wars of the British -- a compelling chronicle of the changes that transformed every strand and strata of British life, faith, and thought during the eventful years from 1603 to 1776.

For nearly two centuries, battles would rage at home and abroad, on sea and on land, up and down the length of burgeoning Britain, across Europe and America. Most of the wars would be wars of faith -- waged on wide-ranging grounds of political or religious conviction -- between Republicans and Royalists, Catholics and Protestants, colonialists and natives. And many of the battles would be fought on fields far from home.

The Wars of the British is a story of revolution and reaction, of progress and catastrophe. It is a story brought vividly, sometimes disturbingly, to light by Schama's evocative narrative, filled with the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people. Here are the great and gifted -- Oliver Cromwell and Christopher Wren, Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson. But here, too, are the lesser known, though no less extraordinary, such as Olaudah Equiano, an African enslaved from childhood, who learned to write and wrote an unforgettable tale.

The American Future by Simon Schama

The 2008 Presidential election brought on an intense soul-searching in the United States. The collapse of twenty years of Republican conservativism prompted the country to examine the trajectory of its history; how it came to find itself in multiple crises and how an America that began as 'the last best hope for mankind' came to be so suspected and vilified around much of the world.

Written by an author who has spent half his life there, this book takes the long view of how the United States has come to this anguished moment of truth about its own identity as a nation and its place in the world.

It covers the most compelling issues facing Americans now: the projection of power; race, immigration and the problematic promise of e pluribus unum; religious conviction in public life; the mystique of American land and its battles with the imperatives of profit - Schama traces the deep history of the present crisis.

The American Future: A History argues that if you want to know what is truly at stake, you need to absorb these stories and understand this history; for understanding is the condition of hope.

The Power of Art by Simon Schama

Closes in on intense make-or-break turning points in the lives of eight great artists who, under extreme stress, created something unprecedented, altering the course of art for ever. This title features Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso and Rothko.

Rough Crossings by Simon Schama

Tens of thousands of blacks in America at the start of the Revolutionary War escaped from farms, plantations, and cities to reach the British who offered the promise of emancipation in return for military service. Schama follows their odyssey through the war and into inhospitable Nova Scotia where thousands were betrayed.

Citizens by Simon Schama

The most authoritative social, cultural and narrative history of the French Revolution, and one of the great landmarks of modern history publishing. Monumental...provocative and stylish, Simon Schama's account of the first few years of the great Revolution in France, and of the decades that led up to it, is thoughtful, informed and profoundly revisionist - Eugen Weber, The New York Times Book Review.

Books by Anne Henderson

Enid Lyons by Anne Henderson

This is the story of an extraordinary woman - mother of 12, Premier's wife, Prime Minister's wife, a Dame, then a popular politician in her own right, Australia's first female cabinet minister, radio broadcaster, newspaper columnist, author of three books, ABC Commissioner. Born to a struggling but aspirational timber family in Tasmania, Enid was married at seventeen to a man aged twice her age. This was the Irish Catholic Joe Lyons, a State Treasurer and Education Minister who would become a popular PM by leaving the ALP to lead the conservatives! Enid Lyons regarded herself as feminist but was also conservative. She was a pacifist and a Fabian reformer underneath her conservative outlook on families and moral life. Enid could be strong on principle but also surprisingly tolerant. She had views on mothering that were ahead of their time. It is said woman can't have family and apolitical career, but Enid Lyons had it all, in spades. But this was at great personal cost. The story of Joe and Enid Lyons is full of dramatic extremes and through their intimate letters a passionate love story is revealed. Anne Henderson has also uncovered new information which indicates a long hidden family secret. There will be controversy over this - and much interest.

An Angel in the Court by Anne Henderson

From humble beginnings in a small-town Salvation Army family to a career as a court chaplain, who gave comfort to some of Australia's most notorious criminals, including accused child killer Kathleen Folbigg , Major Joyce Harmer's life has been one of enormous contrasts. This is the inspiring story of a quiet achiever.

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