JOHN MARTIN'S TALES

I’ve started to wonder if someone is quietly erasing my working life.
It began with my first workplace, The Examiner in Launceston.
For more than 160 years, it sat in the same building in Paterson Street — a place so tied to the paper it might as well have been part of the masthead.

Then it moved.

Just like that. Packed up, relocated and left the old place behind to be carved into something more modern and less… journalistic.

The building is still there, of course. Which almost makes it worse. Same walls, same façade — but none of the noise, none of the urgency, none of the deadlines. As if the newsroom had been carefully removed and the shell left behind as a decoy.

At the time, I put it down to progress.

Then I checked on The Toowoomba Chronicle, where I worked in 1981.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. It, too, had moved from the place I had left it.

New premises. Fresh start. No forwarding address for the past.

After that came The Goulburn Post, where I worked in 1997.

Also moved. Different address. Another clean break.

By now, I was starting to pay attention.

Next, The Canberra Times, where I worked as a sub-editor either side of the turn of the century, and later as a columnist (Capital Circle) in 2005–06.

That one didn’t just move from its base. Oh, no.

The Fyshwick premises were sold for $19.8 million in 2022 and demolished.

The paper moved back into the city, from where it had come in 1987.

Now the old site has new buildings.

It’s a self-storage facility.

What’s being stored there?

My memories, for a start.

I just hope they’re taking good care of them.

I was a little more heartened by the plight of the Post-Courier in Port Moresby, where I worked in 1982.

Technically, it’s still in the same place. Which sounds reassuring — until you think about it. Buildings don’t stay the same for 40-odd years. They get refurbished, upgraded, modernised.

When I was there, there was no air-conditioning. Just ceiling fans turning above a newsroom full of typewriters and loose copy paper — a combination that required a certain amount of faith or a fondness for paper chases

Finally, there’s the Micronesian Focus, where I worked briefly in 1995 in Pohnpei in the northern Pacific.

We didn’t really have an office. Not in the formal sense. We worked in a back room of a house overlooking a sewage plant.

Alas, the paper went broke and disappeared.

In my better moments, however, I like to think the house is still there. That the room still exists. That somewhere in it there’s a chair pushed up against a desk, waiting for me to return.

I’m not suggesting there’s a coordinated effort to remove all trace of my career.

That would be ridiculous.

But I will say this: every time I go looking for evidence, there seems to be a little less of it.