Ten Years On: To Mulach Street down from Garbutt

SO ten years ago when I started writing this blog I was living in a small town called Cooma. Anyone who has been to the NSW skifields of Perisher or Thredbo would undoubtedly have passed through here, although how many of those actually stopped and had a walk around is unknown.

They might as well have. Every Sunday afternoon you'd see cars backed up for miles on the main street as they tried to make it back to Canberra or Sydney or just about anywhere else in time for a good night's sleep before work the next day. See, even though Cooma is considered to be the "capital" of the Snowy Mountains and Monaro region, it wasn't close enough to the snow for people to use it as a base for their hurtling-down-a-mountain endeavours. They instead preferred to stay at lodges at the skifields themselves, or failing that, at the town of Jindabyne.

Cooma was also the headquarters of the Snowy Mountains Scheme, a truly massive engineering and social achievement in the years after WWII. The Scheme featured over 30 nationalities - many from countries that had only just fighting each other - building seven hydro-electric power stations fed by the water formerly from the Snowy River being diverted back into the Murray and Murrumbidgee Rivers.

Given the governments of today can't even get a national broadband network together I doubt the Snowy could have been completed today.

So what was a young man born in the tropical city of Townsville doing there? I wasn't working for Snowy Hydro, never once went to the skifields to repeatedly bang my head against the snow. It was an odd place for a man at home in the heat to be.

Beautiful, sunny Cooma.

Rewind to 2001 and I'd already made the much larger move from Brisbane down to Canberra to study Sports Media at the University of Canberra. By March 2003 I'd managed to pack a fair bit in, starting a very short-lived relationship, having the radio station I worked at close down, getting kicked out of the place I was living in and crashing a mate's car. I was also sick of having to deal with Centrelink and annoyed at having been in school since 1986, so when one of the professors asked if anyone would be interested in a cadet position at the Cooma-Monaro Express I jumped at the chance. I borrowed a mate's car and headed down to a town where we'd passed through coming to and from the snow back in 1985, did the interview, got the gig and moved there in August 2003.

The ironic thing was that apparently I'd made a good impression while doing a two-week internship at the Canberra Times early in 2003. Had I not been so eager to have full-time work with full-time pay, it's highly likely I would have ended up working the sports pages there and getting a perfect start to my journalistic career.

But then, the rest of the story would have changed - and not necessarily for the better.