Noosa journalist Peter Gardiner quits after 42 years in the business

‘Just a little after the Dark Ages and definitely in the thick of the “Don’t You Worry About That” Joh Years, I started out’: veteran Peter Gardiner recalls 42 years working as a journalist.

Former QT scribe and Noosa veteran reporter Peter Gardiner is set to call it a day after a long career he’s struggling to remember.

So this is it.

After spending 42 years of doing my bit to report what Donald Trump would tell us is “fake news”, this Friday I’m finally hanging up my two-finger typing style and slightly fried brain for a more retiring life in Coolum Beach.

Back in the day, just a little after the Dark Ages and definitely in the thick of the “Don’t You Worry About That” Joh Years, I started out at the Queensland Times in my hometown of Ipswich as a first-year cadet in January 1979.

I think the paper had just phased out the courier pigeons used to send out and receive dispatches from the reporting frontline, which almost always was the nearest licensed watering hole.

Just plain silly: Peter Gardiner out on the town with his fellow QT reporters having a brain explosion.

I’m almost sure Alexander Graham Bell had invented the telephone by then and I have vague memories of actually talking into the mouthpiece rather than texting on the screen.

Hell, the only screens we had back then were to keep the flies from your door.

Our smart technology was the “white-out” we used on the copy we badly typed onto pieces of copy paper.

Then the sub-editors would rule savage lines through our stuff-ups, in time for unimpressed proofreaders to further correct spelling and grammar before the presses would roll into life like mighty bastions of the truth every night.

Drinking on the job was not only expected by your fellow scribes, to many it seemed it was their job – one that lasted for life, which for hard-living journos in the 1980s was about age 45 before their livers dissolved.

Let’s just say I survived the worst excesses somehow including all night benders after work at a drinking den we called The Suicide Club.

Then there was an infamous pub crawl with Allan Langer to celebrate his 21st which started out as a lunchtime interview. I’m still yet to file the copy, can’t seem to find my notebook …

Rita Langer with her boy Allan, an Ipswich legend.

The footy legend in the making and me, a Neville Nobody, rolled on through every bar in town drinking free beer. I told the publicans who was shouting, that I was his manager.

This was when Alfie had performed his Origin debut heroics after being plucked out of the obscurity of the Ipswich Jets, only to be told by Maroons coach Wayne Bennett he was too small to play Origin footy.

Alfie killed ’em and had just become the best thing since Tip Top sliced high fibre white bread that his mother Rita plugged on the tele.

Squinting back over four decades of rapid change in the “newspaper game”, I remember using my first clunky computer in the early 1980s when I worked at The Examiner in Tasmania’s deep north for a year.

The poor old Tassie devils I worked with in the newsroom had to endure even more poor taste jokes than we Ipswichians.

I eventually returned to Ippy and the QT for a second coming at a time when the accountants were starting to take over the running of the paper to maximise the profits of strange, mythical creatures called shareholders.

Suddenly we had to abide by office protocols like workplace health and safety, and the blokey culture was largely shown the door. Which, by and large was probably a good thing, as myself and my liver last time I checked, are still in semi-working order.

Peter Gardiner in the guise of the QT sports editor, with snorkel and flippers, ready to play local footy on a very wet track in Ipswich.

Back in 1992, I miraculously made the Great Escape to Coolum Beach.

For the past 29 years, I’ve been on a mission to report mostly on all the goings on in Noosa. I’ve done so knowing that I’m one of the unwashed infidels massing just south of the border, itching to unleash our paid parking and urban conformity.

And I have a confession: From the moment I stepped into the place I was impressed by the fact that Noosa was not so much God’s waiting room for retired Victorians, as a hotbed of activists often taking pot shots at one another.

Mostly they fought over the “look and feel of Noosa” which we all know is no high-rise, no billboards and of course no traffic lights, which sends many motorists around the roundabout bend.

Council usually gives way to all greenery as well – this is a UNESCO Biosphere after all.

And definitely no amalgamations with the great unwashed south of Peregian. This was Noosa’s one true unifying force. No one does “us against them” better than Noosa.

A death by a thousand cuts to the Noosa Plan, the Noosa defenders call it, where signage is allowed to clutter, colours clash and their worst fear of all – wall-to-wall development.

One of my best calls at the Noosa News was my opinion piece after the “shotgun marriage” of Noosa, Maroochy and Caloundra councils which boldly declared that Noosa’s efforts to split again were doomed.

“The State Government will never let them unscramble the omelette,” I wrote, or words to that effect.

I still have the egg on my face.

To all the feisty folk of Noosa, keep up the “good fight” and if you’re down my neck of the woods, look for an older but not wiser bloke with a relaxed grin on his face strolling the Coolum boardwalk or beach and say: “G’day Pete, gee, I thought you were dead”.

Not quite. Just resting.