Podcast Episode: My Work Life in Melbourne

Pip: Brett Hayhoe has spent sixty years not liking change — and has the résumé to prove it.

Mara: Today's episode follows brett through the full arc of a working life: radio, publishing, a website venture, and what it all costs when the ledger finally comes due.

Pip: Let's start with the work life itself.

My Work Life in Melbourne

Pip: This segment is about what a career actually looks like when you strip away the narrative tidiness — four employers across six decades, and the question of whether commitment and stubbornness are the same thing.

Mara: The post opens with a line that sets the whole tone: "I do not like moving. Not homes, not jobs. The disruption required, the leaving behind, the starting again from scratch — none of it has ever appealed."

Pip: And yet the arc keeps moving anyway. Two radio stations, both entered as a salesperson, both ending on air, both ending in someone else's scandal. Same script, different city — that's not bad luck, that's a pattern.

Mara: The first station was 4AM in northern Queensland, serving the Atherton Tablelands. After that came an entertainment agency — genuinely successful until clients realized they could hire directly and cut out the middleman. Then a move south, a relationship that began online, and within a week of arriving in Melbourne, a job at JOY 94.9, the country's first gay and lesbian radio station.

Pip: Which should have been the good chapter.

Mara: It was, for a while. Then a station manager described as "pathetic, ill-equipped, under-achieving" made it the same chapter as before. What followed was the phone call from Tom — a startup, a founding trio, and the beginning of twenty-two years at Q Magazine.

Pip: Twenty-two years is a commitment. The post is honest that passion outlasted commercial discipline, and that the gap between those two things is where the business quietly became a hobby.

Mara: The online edition still runs today, read in the multi-thousands. But the post is direct about the structural problem: "readers who do not subscribe are invisible to advertisers, and advertisers who cannot see an audience will not buy space in it."

Pip: Then there's the website venture — joined as a partner, or so he was told, ended abruptly. The post doesn't soften it.

Mara: It doesn't. "The devastation was of a kind I had not previously experienced. Recovery has not come." The closing section is the plainest writing in the piece — health, money, a misery he dates as the worst he can clearly remember, and an honest accounting of why: "My inability to ask for help has, in the most literal sense, paved this road."

Pip: Hope and logic, traveling together badly.

Mara: That's almost the exact phrase he uses to close. He carries both, he says, and keeps moving.

Pip: Sixty years, four employers, and the most expensive lesson turns out to be the one about asking for help.

Mara: The series keeps going — there's more road in the World Traveller episodes still to come.