‘So Far, So Good : An Entertainment’
BY ROSS FITZGERALD & ANTONY FUNNELL
HYBRID PUBLISHING : MELBOURNE, 2018,
ISBN 978-1-925272-97-0. $22.95.
The new Grafton Everest adventure ‘SO FAR, SO GOOD, which is released on May 1 2018, centres on our hapless professor’s obsession with food and fame; his relationship with his increasingly independent wife Janet; their wayward (and soon to be married) daughter Lee-Anne; and his much-loved terrier Maddie.
This cleverly plotted satire exposes the sad state of universities and of what now passes for politics in the West. Our obsession with technology, our …

BY ROSS FITZGERALD
It’s become conventional wisdom that the Abbott-Turnbull contest is the Liberals’ version of Rudd versus Gillard and a key question is whether the Liberals might complete the parallel by restoring Tony Abbott or installing another conservative to save the furniture at the next election.
But there is a more instructive parallel that turned out to have a different ending. Today’s Abbott-Turnbull rivalry has at least as much in common with that between John Howard and Andrew Peacock …

It’s time to legalise vaping
ROSS FITZGERALD
In 2003 Hon Lik, a Beijing pharmacist, developed an electronic cigarette which attracted interest from industry. Decades before, Hon Lik had become a heavily addicted smoker after authorities banished him to the countryside. All his attempts to quit smoking failed. Hon Lik knew that it was the nicotine in the cigarettes that had kept him smoking but it was the tar in cigarette smoke that would eventually kill him. A pharmacist and gifted technician, …