Australian TV drama The Newsreader has returned for Season 2. It dunks us right back in 1988. I see a suit The [Woman] Newsreader wears on-air and instantly I see, “Marilyn Said. Covers.” Is it sad I go straight to ’80s fashion designers, ’80s dresses I wore?

This morning, my online news features an article where six women who debuted as TV news presenters in the late ‘80s and whose careers still thrive recall how it was starting out.

Me, I was never going to make it as a mainstream journalist, let alone on TV. But I was a journalist, a rock music and entertainment journalist, for 10+ years, and I did make it as far as the News Limited Sydney newsroom, writing for The Australian newspaper. (Also I auditioned as a deejay for a Top 40 radio station. I was incapable of speaking into a mike without veering into an American accent.)

That was 1981. I was 20. On my first day I brought a tapedeck into the newsroom to transcribe an interview. Why wasn’t I using my usual hand-sized recorder? No idea. But the tapedeck required an extension cord plugged into a wall and within minutes a senior journo tripped over it. He swore loudly. I didn’t have a desk space so I was crouching in an aisle between desks. I stayed crouched for quite some time.

Over liquid lunch at the pub, I asked the Chief of Staff about cadetships. He snorted and said, “When I was your age, I’d been chasing ambulances for four years.” If I’d had the least presence of mind, I might have piped back “Well I’ve been chasing rock bands for three years, and that’s more hazardous.” But I never mentioned a cadetship again.

A lift door opened and there stood Ita Buttrose, legend of Australian journalism, at that time editor of News Limited’s Sunday Telegraph. I remember Ita as Juno-esque, in a dress with big black polka dots, glassy-eyed with high-gloss orange lipstick. (I nearly wrote “orange lipstick you could catch flies on” – but the double entendre is foul, and unconscious. I nearly described her as a fembot, which is foul too.) Ita would be inspiring, right? Truth is: I was terrified.

I was terrified by everything in that newsroom. I took to coming into the office at about midnight, after seeing bands, and writing my copy in a semi-darkened cavern with few or no other journalists present. The wonderful columnist Geraldine Pascall would sometimes work near me in the Arts section. Geraldine was kind. She would push fish’n’chips at me and gentle cajole, “Eat.” In those days fish’n’chips was newspaper-wrapped. The irony. (Geraldine died far too young.)

Nobody missed me when I went to the States for a few months. When I came back, the male temporary replacement I’d organised had replaced me permanently.

At this time there was an Australian Broadcasting Corporation evening news show called Nationwide. They had their New York-based political correspondent do a light piece on Australian bands attempting to break into the U.S. music market. He was a fine journalist, but music was not his forte. I wrote a short letter to Nationwide’s producer suggesting coverage of the Australian music industry might be better served by a specialist reporter. I didn’t mean me. I meant anyone who could do the subject justice. I received a letter back saying (reconstructed in memory), “I admit this report was not our most successful. But I have now read your letter three times [was it five?], and I still cannot make sense of what you are trying to say.”

It’s true I was not my most lucid just at that point. It’s true my letter was handwritten in green biro. But hey, mate, way to punch down, no? (It makes me laugh now, imagining that veteran producer squinting at my two paragraphs for ten full minutes then flinging it down and typing his riposte.)

Meanwhile, while I was in Sydney, my friend in Melbourne was working her way up from writing TV listings to covering state social issues to covering state parliament to a posting in Canberra, covering national politics. Then her newspaper sent her to Russia. She covered Russia’s war in Afghanistan, the Chechen wars, everything pertaining to the former Soviet Union (after it was former), then later, for a prestige U.S. major newspaper, Sub-Saharan Africa, and then China. Today she’s covering the Ukraine-Russia war as Russia bureau chief. She tells me writing TV listings at the outset was fun, a happy memory. She had qualities I lacked. Plus mega-talent.

Women journalists are abundant in talent. In 1989 I had the opportunity to work on a special project for 10 weeks at Kerry Packer’s Cleo magazine, edited by Lisa Wilkinson. Lisa went on to be a household name, with a starry career in TV. What I remember best about her at Cleo was how consultative she was. Also how decisive. It astonished me that she’d ask a blow-in like me my opinions on editorial. Specially as I spent too much of my time at Cleo in toilet cubicles crying. I’d had a short DOA stint at a public relations consultancy and what confidence I might have had was shot.

I owed the opportunity to be at ACP (Australian Consolidated Press) to Cleo deputy editor Andrea Jones, a fellow music journalist who moved seamlessly into magazine editing. Andrea was talented, smart, hardworking, and a good friend to me.

At ACP I was able to write for GH, the revamped Good Housekeeping, which morphed into HQ. The editor was Shona Martyn, later publishing director of HarperCollins, now a senior editor for the Sydney Morning Herald and its Spectrum magazine supplement. Shona was bright as a new coin. I remain grateful I got to fulfil my ambition to write short Arts profiles.

I did not continue in journalism, but I’m glad the talented women I knew were, for the most part, able to forge careers that used their talents. The male journalists’ boys’ club in the ’80s was noxious. I’m so glad it wasn’t able to suppress those women.

Declaration of interest re The Newsreader: My aunt was an on-air reporter for SBS TV in the early 80s, and before that for Channel 7 Perth. The writer and creator of The Newsreader, Michael Lucas, is the half-brother of one of my sister’s ex live-ins. It’s a small world.