“If you stay close to this movement, son, you’ll be alright.” ROSS FITZGERALD takes us on an intimate and painful journey through his dark days of destructive drinking to how Alcoholics Anonymous saved his life – and that of a famous friend.

The late Barry Humphries, the legendary actor Anthony Hopkins, and I share two things in common.

The three of us achieved long-term sobriety due to the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous, and all of us have spoken and written widely about the AA movement. This has helped many people to join AA and stop drinking.

Until he died in 2023, Barry Humphries and I were friends for 61 years. We drank together, got sober together and worked together. We also wrote memoirs that detailed our destructive drinking and how important AA was to our lives and our careers.

In his two-part autobiography More Please (1992) and My Life as Me (2002), Humphries wrote candidly about what he used to be like as a drinker and what he was like as a sober alcoholic.

The same applies to Anthony Hopkins who was 50 years sober on December 29. In his brilliantly revealing memoir, We Did OK, Kid (2025), Hopkins gives a warts-and-all account of his life as an extremely destructive drinker and then for decades as a productive sober person.

Three of my own books deal with being sober in Alcoholics Anonymous – two memoirs My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey (2010) and Fifty Years Sober (2020), plus My Last Drink (2022) a co-edited collection of 32 stories of recovering alcoholics.

In October 1982 Quadrant had published my article, Inside Alcoholics Anonymous. This was the first detailed piece published in Australia about this topic. 

The turning point in the life of Anthony Hopkins occurred on December 29, 1975, when, after driving his car through the night from Arizona to California while drunk, in a “blackout”, he realised that he was an alcoholic who could have killed himself, which he then didn’t care about, or much more importantly, somebody else.

As Hopkins puts it: “I came to my senses and said to an ex-agent of mine at this party in Beverly Hills, ‘I need help’. It was 11 o’clock precisely – I looked at my watch – and this is the spooky part: some deep powerful thought or voice spoke to me from inside and said: “It’s all over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it.” 

Hopkins confides that this voice came from deep inside him: “But it was vocal, male, reasonable, like a radio voice. The craving to drink was taken from me or left. 

“Now I don’t have any theories except divinity or that power that we all possess inside us that creates us from birth, life force, whatever it is. It’s a consciousness, I believe. That’s all I know.”

In fact, Hopkins still regularly attends AA meetings, not just in Los Angeles but wherever else in the world he is living or working.

When I joined Alcoholics Anonymous, I was at the end of the road. The stark reality is that, if I hadn’t stopped drinking and drugging at 25 years of age, I wouldn’t have made 26.

Unlike Hopkins and Humphries, had I not started drinking at 14 I may well have taken my own life by the age of 17. This is because, as a child I felt like a garbage-tip, and alcohol enabled me to hold down those dreadful feelings, but only for a while.

Then the progressive nature of the illness of alcoholism began to thoroughly take hold. This was until, through the agency of Alcoholics Anonymous, and particularly through attending AA meetings, on Australia Day 1970 I was able to stop drinking and using other mood-changing drugs

Barry Humphries and I first met in 1963 at the Notting Hill Hotel near Monash University where I often stumbled around as a drunken student. 

Six years later, after my return from Cleveland, Ohio, where I had been hospitalised many times for alcoholism and drug addiction, Barry and I were both admitted to a Melbourne hospital called Delmont.

The lead psychiatrist there, Dr John Moon, was a strong supporter of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Although, in later years we sometimes visited rehab facilities to talk with other alcoholics who were still suffering, Delmont was the last mental hospital to which either Barry or I were admitted as patients.

The night before we were due to be discharged from Delmont, we were taken to an AA meeting at the Malvern Town Hall. 

After the meeting I came up in tears to an inspirational AA member, “Antique Harry”, and asked: “Do you ever think I’ll get this thing?”

Instead of saying: “No hope unless you get off the tablets,” which is true but not particularly helpful, Harry said to me, with great gentleness: “If you stay close to this movement, son, you’ll be alright.”

Those words, which Barry overheard, changed our lives. With the assistance of “Antique Harry”, “Broken Hill Jack”, “Breathless Beryl” and other long-time members of AA, we both became free of alcohol and other drugs in 1970 and stayed that way.

Our years of alcoholic drinking had serious effects on our families. Our fathers, although very different – Barry’s a well-to-do, very conservative builder from Camberwell and mine a fitter and turner who captained Collingwood Football Club Seconds and only read the Saturday night edition of the pink-coloured Sporting Globe – became close in mutual concern for us both.

Shortly before we got off the booze, Eric Humphries said to my father, Bill Fitzgerald: “I was so worried about Barry, I couldn’t play golf on Tuesday.” These poignant words remind me so much of Barry’s most endearing character, Sandy Stone.

My parents were so worried about me that they attended an Al-Anon meeting in Brighton. Al-Anon is a fellowship, based on AA’s 12 suggested Steps of Recovery, where relatives of alcoholics meet together to try and help each other.

My mother’s name was Edna. Years later, when Barry invited her to a performance in Melbourne, Dame Edna Everage pointed to my mum and said: “There’s a real Edna here tonight. She’s going to be so cross I mentioned her!”

When we were both two years sober, I played a cameo role in the raucous Australian comedy, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie in 1972.

A year later I was with Barry at his first appearance as Les Patterson. Barry asked would I come with him to the Rooty Hill RSL Club in Sydney’s outer suburbs.

Shortly after we sat down in the auditorium, Barry got up and said: “I’ll be back soon.” 

A little while later, a nondescript bloke in a crumpled suit stumbled on stage and said: “Gidday. Name’s Leslie Colin Patterson. Manager, Rooty Hill.” He then delivered a meandering monologue on the theme “Time Waits for No Man”. It took me a couple of minutes to realise it was Barry! 

This was before he converted Les into Australia’s dribbling, randy, dipsomaniacal Minister for the Yartz.

Barry often told me that Les Patterson was the character he enjoyed playing the most. This was because, as a long-time sober person, he could channel all of his many negativities into the dreadful drunkard, Sir Les.

In 1975 Barry and I created another awful character – the radical schoolteacher, Craig Steppenwolf, who Barry performed throughout Australia in his show, At Least You Can Say You’ve Seen It.

Under the heading “Craig Steppenwolf: A monologue for the music-hall, by Barry Humphries and Ross Fitzgerald”, the November 1975 issue of Quadrant published our entire script. The front page featured a photo of Barry as this dreadful anarchist activist who promoted the “de-schooling” of students.

It was Barry Humphries who, on Guy Fawkes Day, 1974, introduced me to my future wife and friend of 45 years, the model and actor Lyndal Moor, who was then living with one of Australia’s richest men, Clyde Packer. At the time he was Barry’s manager.

Lyndal and I met at a very large AA meeting at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, near Sydney’s Kings Cross, after which Lyndal never drank alcohol again.

My first words to her on November 5 were: “If you only knew what could happen to you if you stay close to Alcoholics Anonymous.” Little did she know that, a year to the day, we would become lovers and that, on Guy Fawkes Day 1976, we would be married in the courtyard and garden of Lyndal’s little terrace house in Paddington.

When she ditched Clyde Packer (who fled to America never to return) to team up with me, Barry quipped: “Lyndal went from diamonds to boiled lollies!”

Barry attended our wedding. His present was The Complete Oxford Dictionary, compressed into two large volumes, accompanied by a magnifying glass to enable us to read the small print. In the front, Barry wrote: “For darling Lyndal and Ross. In case you ever have ‘words’.”

Lyndal was 45 years sober when she died on January 22, 2020. I miss her more and more each day.

For decades, Barry and I attended Alcoholics Anonymous in Australia and also in England and the US.

These days, the only meeting that I can walk to is my Saturday 2pm home group, South Sydney, held at Kepos Street in Redfern. 

If I can get a lift, I still try to attend two or three meetings a week. This is because it is only at AA that I feel truly useful.

As I sometimes say: “You don’t have to like me, but I am a remarkable example of what AA can achieve with someone so damaged – not just by alcohol and other drugs but also by lodes of ECT (‘electro-convulsive therapy’), which in the 1960s I was given without anaesthesia.”

Ross Fitzgerald AM is emeritus professor of history and politics at Griffith University. His recent books, all published by Hybrid, include a memoir, Fifty Years Sober: An Alcoholic’s Journey; the final Grafton Everest Adventure, Pandemonium, and Chalk and Cheese: A Fabrication, co-authored with Ian McFadyen.