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.

10 Years and Counting...

A LITTLE over 10 years ago (June 17, 2004 for those playing at home) I wrote a blog defending my home state of Queensland. This was prompted by Game II of the 2004 State of Origin series, where Queensland won courtesy of some Billy Slater chase-gather-kick-chase-gather-score magic.

At the time I was living by myself in a small two-bedroom flat in the little town of Cooma, a young journalist hoping to a) move back to Brisbane, and b) become the chief cricket writer for a national publication. More disturbingly, New South Wales would go on to win the series the night before a photo of me in a Queensland Origin top appeared in the local paper to say I was now the local sports journalist. Any blogs I wrote were publicised via the old-fashioned means of sending mass emails out to people, which played havoc with both work and Hotmail/Yahoo mail accounts.

Fast-forward ten years and I live alone in a small two-bedroom flat back in Brisbane. (As an aside there's not much to read into why I live alone other than I am one of the messiest people around, only consistently bettered by an ex-colleague who once lost a book in a cereal box. True story.) I write reports for work, albeit in SQL rather than English. I'm not the chief cricket writer for a national publication but do have at least one such person following me on Twitter and have had an article published on ESPN Cricinfo, which I believe is the most-read cricket website in the world. It's also pretty easy to publicise posts via social media, which was pretty much unheard of in the deep, dark days of 2004.

So ten years after starting this blog and the end result is pretty much the same. A change of scenery, change of job.

And a whole bunch of living life in between.



I HAD planned on writing about the last ten years, summarising it in one simple blog post. Thinking about it now though I'm not quite sure how I would go about that, so instead, I'm going to try for something else.

Once a week. Story at a time. 52 snippets on Life, The Universe and Everything (from the last 10 years). I'll start at the start (winter 2004, why haven't you been paying attention?) and work my way through. If there's a topic you think should be covered then feel free to suggest them. I don't know how this will turn out, or indeed if I will actually write 52 different blog posts in a year when I've barely covered that in ten years, but it could be interesting.

Living the last ten years certainly was.