DAVID FALKENMIRE After 45 years in one industry, many could be forgiven for seeing retirement as the light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. Courier-Mail bowls columnist, David Falkenmire, is in the rare and enviable position of dreading the day he has to leave the office for the last time. Almost half a century after beginning a cadetship at the Northern Daily Leader in his hometown of Tamworth, Falkenmire still views his job as a hobby and an opportunity to indulge his lifelong passion for sports.
“I still enjoy going to work… and I probably am getting close to retirement, but I’ll find it really hard to give it away,” he says.
Describing himself as a ‘mad horse-racing fan’, David’s love of sport was sparked by his father’s involvement in racehorses, which saw him attending meets from a young age.
In an unfortunate twist of fate, his father’s biggest racing win came just three months after his death in 2003.
David had inherited a share of his father’s horse, On a High, in September and it pulled off a big win in the Sydney’s Villiers stakes in December.
He has since part-owned a number of horses, but without much success in the costly sport. His first true sporting love was cricket, though, and it was the gentlemen’s game that first got his feet in the journalism door.
How did you get into sports writing? “I
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lumnist, r Mail bowls co As the Courie n bowls w no -k of the best David is one ensland writers in Que told me it was too hard to get into. I used to drop off the score books at the local paper in Tamworth and my dad was captain of the Northern District team. I started doing short stories on the games and just dropping them up to the paper and they rang me up and asked if I’d like to do a cadetship.” Falkenmire’s cricketing talent lay as much in playing as in writing and he eventually moved on to play for Sydney’s Northern Districts side while continuing to work in Tamworth.
After two years of catching overnight trains to Sydney for matches, David decided to make a move to the big smoke, applying to a number of newspapers in the New South Wales capital. His job search took an unexpected turn when The Australian offered him a position in Brisbane. Newly married and halfway through a cricket season, David came to the sunshine state.
He has since made a permanent home north of the border, with the exception of a cricketing stint in England in the early 70s.
On his return from the mother country, David continued playing cricket and was named reserve wicketkeeper for the 1973-74 Queensland Sheffield Shield squad. This was his last season of serious cricket however, with the odd hours demanded by the competitive sports journalism industry forcing him to choose between his playing and reporting careers. Work won out and Falkenmire moved into a role in the Courier Mail sports department, with an opportunity to learn under some of the newspaper’s most famous staffers.
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