He does not accept free trips or drinks with ministers. And he is a former staffer of The Sunday Age, The Age, BRW Magazine, Time Magazine, New Internationalist, Pacific Islands Monthly, The Bulletin, Far Eastern Economic Review, China Mail, Fiji Times and New Guinea Post-Courier. He trained, 1955-59, on the Border Counties Advertizer (Oswestry, England) and spent two years as a British army conscript, serving in Singapore and Malaya.