End of an era: McCrann’s snapshot of 46 years

It’s the end of an era as legendary business columnist Terry McCrann looks back at the past 46 years as he signs off on his last regular column.

Terry McCrann, pictured over the years, is signing off on his last regular column.

This is it. My final regular column.

It completes a journey that I embarked on 46 years ago, when in 1978 I first started writing a daily business and economic commentary column.

And I continued, writing, for most of that time, six columns a week, unbroken since.

Albeit, with along the way, some time off for good – or indeed, bad – behaviour. So, I guess I’ve totted up somewhere north of 12,000 in total.

For nine years, I was writing first in Melbourne’s The Age newspaper and then also in its sister paper The Sydney Morning Herald.

And for the last 37 years it’s been in Melbourne’s The Herald, its subsequent incarnation as The Herald Sun, along with The Weekend Australian, The Telegraph in Sydney, Brisbane’s The Courier-Mail and The Adelaide Advertiser.

It’s been a rollicking ride. For you and me both. Although, I’ve had the time-honoured journalist ‘privilege’ of ‘power without responsibility’.

But far more specifically, the privilege of the ‘insider’. Of the access to the decision-makers, when the big decisions were being made in business and government.

For a beginner columnist, I had a dream start, kicking off with the battle to take over Ansett Airlines. A battle that would rage for almost a year, and provide dozens of columns.

It had been kicked off by Rupert Murdoch being prepared to buy an airline to get his hands on a single TV station. In two words: that’s Rupert.

Then on into the 1980s.

1980s entrepreneur Alan Bond.

We and the world had the ‘Decade of Greed’. We alone had Paul Keating and his sweeping financial deregulation.

To me, they came together in one bizarrely surreal night when Keating – who had been raised on the mother’s milk of hating the ‘Big End of Town’, at the teat of Depression-era NSW Labor premier Jack Lang – formerly, as treasurer, launched the Bank of America into Australia at a lavish black-tie dinner, at, wait for it: The Melbourne Club.

The 1980s would end in tears. Two sets of tears.

First with the never-before and never-since global stock market crash of 1987.

For me, it was to be woken by a phone call from the editor around 6am, to be told that Wall St had plunged 22 per cent overnight.

To be asked to write a column, making some meaningful sense of it – ahead of our own market opening, to a similar devastation just a few hours later.

The ‘tears’ of far more Australians would be the 18 per cent home loans interest rates.

Every year would bring new fodder. The GFC, the Covid years, the time my phone was bugged by ‘entrepreneur-come-spiv’, Alan Bond.

It’s just a tad chilling to listen to recordings of your phone calls, as I got to do.

My fuller journalism journey has actually been 54 years, starting in 1970, at Melbourne’s Sun-News Pictorial.

I was hired by the legendary Harry Gordon. And most recently I worked with the equally legendary Peter Blunden.

It was like starting your playing career as an AFL footballer at Geelong with the original Gary Ablett, and then getting to play in your twilight years with his son Gary Jnr.