Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Materiel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to note the passing of a significant Australian. Mr Alan Fitzgerald passed away on 31 March 2011. Alan was a distinguished journalist, author and satirist. He was a founder and former president of the National Press Club and a member of the former ACT Advisory Council. He was one of the iconic characters of Canberra life during the period after the Second World War when this city was growing at a remarkable pace and was full of people who had come to live here from other parts of Australia. To feed the requirements of government departments, people were being shifted here from Melbourne, Sydney and the like. Canberrans had a common experience at that time as they began to populate this new city which was going rapidly.

Alan was born in Sydney in 1935 and educated in Catholic schools in the eastern suburbs before going first into advertising and then into trade journalism. He came to Canberra in 1964 from Fiji, where he had edited the Fiji Times. He was invited to write a satirical column for the Canberra Times by the paper's then editor, John Pringle, whom he had met while writing in London. This column made Alan Fitzgerald an immensely popular figure in Canberra.

Alan Fitzgerald's writing was very successful in part because his wry observations reflected the experience of most of his readers. At this time Canberra was burgeoning, with the population increasing by 10 per cent a year and a new suburb opening almost every month. Young public servants were arriving in Canberra, getting married and starting families, just as Alan and his wife, Maria, were themselves doing. Through common experience, and often shared frustration, Alan's satire helped to forge the character of a rapidly growing city. But he had a much wider audience than just the people living in the ACT. He also wrote opinion pieces for the Age, the Sun-Herald, the Sunday Australian; the Sunday Observer and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Alan Fitzgerald was a founder and early president of the National Press Club. He was president from 1969 to 1971 and remained active on the club's committee for many years. He was a member of the federal parliamentary press gallery. He was hired as a foreign correspondent for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Ottawa in 1974. He conducted his own current affairs program for nine years on Canberra radio station 2CA. He was also a frequent contributor to ABC radio programs and made regular appearances on Channel 7's breakfast program. In time he even became a publisher himself, presiding over the conservative periodical the Australian National Review for five years and establishing the Australian Constitutional News. He continued to be a prolific author all his life, writing thousands of satirical newspaper stories, hundreds of opinion pieces and a dozen humorous and historical books on Canberra. His son Julian, also a journalist, recently commented that almost until the day of his death his father was still reading newspapers and listening to current affairs. He published the satirical compilation Fitzgerald's Canberra: A Guide to Life in the National Capital, which contained gems such as this:

The longest distance between two points is a Canberra bus route … Bus routes are determined by the need to move the least number of people the longest distance in the maximum time.

Some would say that not much has changed in the intervening few decades. He, however, was never cruel or spiteful in his satire; it was a gentle ribbing of the city, its institutions and the way in which it worked.

Like so many who moved to this city in its rapidly growing phrase, he loved the city and he knew it very well. For many years he was a member and chairman of the ACT Historic Sites and Building Committee, now the ACT Heritage Council, that had been established at his initiative to protect and preserve historic homesteads and buildings at a time of rapid expansion of the city into the surrounding rural area. Like so many adopted sons and daughters of this city, he was deeply in love with this place. Beyond his daily journalism he published a number of books on the history of Canberra, including Historic Canberra 1825-1945, Canberra's Engineering Heritage, Canberra and the New Parliament House and Canberra in Two Centuries—A Pictorial History.

He was also involved in the public life of this city. That is somewhat ironic given that he spent a lot of time lampooning the institutions that he ultimately participated in and joined. He had a real dedication to the formation of the city of Canberra and to his fellow citizens, but I think he felt an obligation to remind them of the less serious side of that process while doing that. In 1967 he was elected to the pre-self-government ACT Advisory Council, an institution he had lampooned in his columns. He ran on the platform that he promised to do absolutely nothing, citing as his inspiration local politicians. This promise, I must say, was not kept. Once elected, Mr Fitzgerald took his role very seriously, working behind the scenes to help the Canberra community.

With increasing respect and popularity in the Canberra community, he was twice fielded as a candidate for the Australia Party and ran for election in 1970 and 1972 in the federal seat of the Australian Capital Territory, as it was then known. Though he missed out both times, he is remembered for having gained the largest vote of any Australia Party candidate in an election.

He served as a director of the National Capital Development Commission, which of course was the precursor of today's National Capital Authority. That again may seem slightly ironic, given that he had lampooned the NCDC for many years. Of course, in that respect he was in very good company: virtually every Canberran had something unpleasant to say about the NCDC—at least until the time it disappeared, at which point everyone became very nostalgic about its role in the building of the city. For example, Alan wrote:

In Canberra, even the mistakes are planned, by the National Capital Development Commission.

But, again, once in office in that role at the NCDC he was instrumental in improving Canberra, taking very seriously his role as a representative of the Canberra community in that way and ensuring that the city grew consistent with the character that was conceived for it and that reflected the needs of a living, breathing city and not merely a design-winning entry in a competition. He was also a foundation member and chairman of the ACT and region branch of the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy and played an active role in the debate about Australia becoming a republic in 1999.

He said in his 2001 autobiography:

... my life had been shaped by living in the national capital in ways that I could not have imagined possible had I lived elsewhere.

In saying that, once again, he exhibited this great ability to speak for many, many Canberrans. He was changed, as were thousands and thousands of people, by the experience of moving to this new, rather strange environment of the planned national capital. But as he grew and developed so did the city around him, and that embryonic relationship made an important difference to the way in which the city grew and became, in my humble opinion, one of the best places in Australia to live.

On this occasion I believe we need to extend, as a chamber, our condolences to Alan's family, particularly his wife, Maria, and his sons, Dominic and Julian—and I see some of them in the chamber tonight—his six grandchildren, his extended family and his friends in their loss. He was more than simply a contributor; he was a man who chronicled and reflected the changing nature of the national capital at a critical time in its development. We would all certainly have been much, much poorer had he not been here, had he not written so prolifically about this city, had he not lifted the tone of the city with his comments and had he not made the contribution he made in so many ways to the institutions which were responsible for the development of the modern city of Canberra.