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John Martin was born on October 6 in 1958 in the Queen Victoria Hospital in Launceston, Tasmania, to John Thomas Martin and Grace Martin. He has three sisters - two older, Therese and Kate, and one younger, Sally. (Click here for a picture of all of us, together for the last time, in Launceston in about 1992) or for a gallery of pictures of a reunion of five of us in Launceston in March 2005 and eight nieces and nephews. He married Katherine Anderson at Cradle Mountain in Tasmania on August 7, 1995. Their son Jack was born on May 23, 1996, four or five months after John's dad died. At 17, John Martin followed his dad and sister Therese into journalism when he landed a cadetship with The Examiner newspaper in Launceston almost by mistake. When John Martin was growing up, the last thing he ever wanted to be was a journalist (he saw too many unsociable, high pressure hours worked and too many drunken and divorced journalists) but when he finished matriculation in 1975 he had not a clue what he wanted to do. His father sent him to Europe for most of 1976 on the understanding that on his return he would cast the dice - for the workforce or university. After his taste of freedom, however, the last thing he wanted was to study - so he applied for a cadetship and got it. His first application, his first job! John Martin started as a copy boy on October 25, 1976. He has been around journalism since - barring a year off bumming around Europe and six months in the Pacific. He has done everything from being a news reporter, sports reporter, feature reporter, sub-editor of all sorts, chief of staff, acting news editor, acting editor. For 15 months, he compiled a five-day-a-week column in The Canberra Times called CC - which contained short offbeat items, curiosities and snippets of news with an emphasis on community and local history. It was a serious job, especially even when the editor called him in and told him to make his next column his last. The last piece appeared on his 48th birthday, October 6 , 2006. John Martin worked for about 15 or 16 years in two stints for The Examiner in Launceston. In between, he did time at the Karwyn Kronicle (OK, it was a share house with a bunch of chemically altered Australians but it was an end-of-year publication), London; Corporate Communications in Hobart writing mainly for the old Melbourne Sun; the Chronicle in Toowoomba, Queensland; the Post-Courier in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea; the Micronesia Focus on the Pacific island of Pohnpei and the Goulburn Post in New South Wales. He wrote a chess column for the Hobart Mercury in 1989-90 under the anagram of Norman J. Hit (who also featured in his novel, Apples) and for 18 months he wrote weekly humour columns for The Advocate, Burnie. The arrangement with The Advocate ended with the end of the financial year in 1998. He has tried his hand at other things, with little success. For a while, he cleaned toilets at a youth hostel in Athens, He spent a few days in some monasteries, he played three stunning football games on the wing in grade three and four and he tried being a house-husband for a while. He kept coming back to what he knew and the security blanket on the sub-editor’s table. He upset too many people as a reporter. John Martin was banned by a football coach because he did not like the things he wrote, he was escorted off the oval on the Tasmanian Thousands sports carnival once because the head honcho did not like the things herote and he suspects he nearly single-handedly caused East Germany and West Germany to rebuild the Berlin Wall when he covered the world rowing championships in 1990 and wrote a well-researched article that the two newly aligned camps basically still hated each other, even though the spin doctors were doing their best to present a united front. Yes, now he is trying his hardest to keep out of trouble. Hence this cleverly disguised home site. Send gifts, cars, well wishes, brickbats or bouquets to John Martin. For the family minded, here's some pictures from his mum's photo album.
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