She’d been a journalist more than half her life. A week out of high school she walked into The Albury-Wadonga Border Mail with a handful of photos of Black Springs Creek at the start of a dry spell. A photo of a dried sheep carcass in the middle of the barren creek bed, with the Albury Cemetery in the distance, made it onto the front page. Editor Bob Carlisle asked if she could put a couple of hundred words together to go with the photos. She went home, dug out her old geography text book and began two years of reporting on what would become the drought of the early ’90s. Carlisle had been her mentor ever since.

Then there was a move to Sydney, where she reported for The Herald another two years, while in the evenings she did a diploma in TV production at a dubious private college. In her early twenties she went to