After 38 years as a journalist, including more than 30 on the Australian Financial Review, the down under Wall Street Journal, the newspaper I worked for could not stop its advertisers shifting to digital outlets. In 2016, as part of a savage round of redundancies, I was called into the Fairfax boardroom in Sydney (the two big players in the Australian newspaper scene are Fairfax and News) and told "sorry Mark". My original training was in physics and maths, gaining a science degree at Melbourne University in the 1970s. I landed a job at what was then about the only computer newspaper in Australia because I had taught myself to type, from one of my sister's secretarial textbooks. In those days it was rare for a boy to know how to type.

In that very long career in journalism I did specialist/trade, suburban, country/regional and, for the AFR, science reporting, companies (takeovers, profit results, market movements) personal finance, special reports editing, leader writing, accounting/legal reporting and a stint as Perth bureau chief. Now I do a little contract work, the occasional article for The Australian version of the British magazine The Spectator, and write books. I have a wife and adult children in Sydney but at the moment I'm keeping an eye on my aged dad in Melbourne.