I chalk up 40 years at Australian Camera magazine with this issue. I joined the company that started it – Iris Publishing – on 15 March 1982 as an editorial assistant, after answering a job ad for a trainee journalist that had appeared in The Sydney Morning Herald on 23 January. I’d graduated from Sydney Teachers College at the end of the previous year and, with no immediate prospect of getting a teaching job in the NSW state school system, I’d started looking around for something else. Ironically, at the time I was working at a local furniture factory, assembling school chairs for the NSW Department Of Education.
The job interview on 9 February was at Iris’s small office in Brookvale on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. I was then living by one of the southernmost beaches (Cronulla), so it was with some fear and trepidation that I set off on the trek in my 1963 Mini 850… not the most reliable vehicle even if you were just popping down to the shops. All went well until, going
