There’s a nondescript, blonde-brick apartment block — three storeys high, maybe four — clumped among other forgotten flats in Sydney’s western suburbs where I learnt about storytelling.

Street name? No idea. Suburb? Couldn’t tell you, but definitely the other side of Parramatta. Hoxton Park, Seven Hills, Marylands. Somewhere out there.

It would have been towards the end of 1988, and, at 21, I was bumbling my way through a journalism cadetship at The Daily Mirror, still working out if I wanted to be a reporter, a footballer or a bookmaker. Or maybe a lawyer? Make a lot of money, apparently. Bit hard though.

I’d just finished a three-month stint doing police rounds where senior scribes broke the big stories while I was despatched to poorly-attended press conferences for snippets that migh

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