FitzGerald was born in Hunters Hill, New South Wales, a third-generation Australian of Irish extraction, and studied science at the University of Sydney.
He left before graduating, however, and followed in the footsteps of both his father and grandfather Robert D. FitzGerald by taking up a post as a surveyor.
In the 1930s he travelled to Fiji where he worked the Native Lands Commission, surveying tribal boundaries, an experience important to his poetry.
[1] He spent World War II doing engineering surveys in New South Wales and working for the Australian Department of the Interior (from 1939 to 1965).
Jack Lindsay wrote of them: FitzGerald and Slessor were the poets who were to carry on in their own ways the impetus begotten by Vision and in the 1930s to dominate Australian poetry, lifting it definitively to a new level of intellectual responsibility and ending once for all the reign of the slipshod, the pedestrian and the emotionally inchoate.In later life, too, FitzGerald was influential, not only through his poetry but as a lecturer and reviewer.