Peter Richardson has tales to tell

AFTER being on a newspaper payroll for 64 years, it's amazing that Peter Richardson still has a few more stories up his sleeve.

Peter Richardson launches his autobiography at Books of Buderim. Picture: Cade Mooneycm

AFTER being on a newspaper payroll for 64 years, it’s amazing that Peter Richardson still has a few more stories up his sleeve.

In fact, he has just released a book full of them.

Rather than just the “straight reporting” of his days as a cadet reporter in Toowoomba, or as editor of the Nambour Chronicle, Peter’s latest work is personal.

It’s a powerful insight into the newspaper industry, growing up in Queensland, his love of wife and family, and more than 50 years of living on the Sunshine Coast.

Daily editor-in-chief Mark Furler, who launched Peter’s memoirs, Aged in Ink, at Books of Buderim, described the paper’s longest-serving columnist as a father of journalism on the Coast.

A stickler for detail and someone passionate about crafting every word, Peter learnt from a tough master in the reading room of the Toowoomba Chronicle, where he started as a cadet in 1945.

Since moving to Nambour in 1957, Peter has shared thousands of stories and columns with Coast readers.

Daughter Laurel Schneider said at the launch her father was always an avid advocate for original thought and an “equally avid opponent of the cliché”.

In his time he invented a few phrases, including “small-L liberal”, to denote a person who thinks liberally on issues but does not necessary have anything to do with, or in common with, the Liberal Party of Australia.

“Dad first coined the phrase in an article published in the Bulletin about 40 years ago, and it is now one bandied around frequently,” Laurel said.

In 64 years, her father had adapted to massive and continual technological change, Laurel said.

“I’m just not allowed to touch his computer, because apparently it always looks different after I have used it,” she joked.

Read Peter Richardson's latest column

Originally published as Peter Richardson has tales to tell