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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, goingmy application form and I’ve kept it ever since. It’s marked at the top in red ink, “Highly possible”, and it also records that my speech, grammar, grooming and manner all rated as “good”. I scored an “Excellent” for my photographic knowledge, and a “Very good” for my audio knowledge (a magazine for the audio-visual market was being planned). My writing skills were described as “formal”… well, what do you expect from an English teacher? My typing skills rated “a bit slow”, which was being generous. To this day, I’m still a two-finger pecker, but a very fast one. I probably also got some brownie points for being a regular reader of what