Garry Linnell was in year 11 at North Geelong High when he wrote an incendiary editorial for the school's end-of-year magazine "berating" the principal for spending too much on sports and not enough on the library.
He did not return the following year, instead finishing his studies at the local technical college.
"They'd taken hundreds of thousands of dollars and built this brand spanking new gym," Linnell said.
"The English teacher slipped it into the magazine without getting anyone above him to read it, and it caused a stink.
"Parents were ringing the school saying, 'This is outrageous. Why haven't you fixed up the library?'"
It was an early taste of provocative journalism for a reporter who would go on to work as a senior editorial executive for the Packers and the Murdochs.
Today, the Walkley Award winner begins a new weekly column for ACM mastheads across the country.
Linnell began his career in 1982 as a cadet at The Age, winning a Walkley for feature writing in 1998 before being appointed editor-in-chief of Kerry Packer's beloved Bulletin magazine four years later.
In 2006, James Packer asked him to move to Channel Nine as news and current affairs director.
"I walked in the first day and discovered they'd put out a release saying I would oversee a round of redundancies.
"It was a tough 18 months. I wasn't aware they were trying to strip it down to sell to a private equity firm."
Linnell was editor of The Daily Telegraph for three years then moved back to Fairfax in 2011 as its metro media editorial director.
He said Rupert Murdoch would come to Sydney once a year when he was in charge of the Tele and the "war drums would sound out around the building".
"He would suddenly appear in your office. That was one of his great little tactics.
"He'd bring out his red pen and we'd go through the paper and have a discussion. But Kerry Packer was probably more interventionist than Rupert Murdoch ever was."
Linnell co-hosted 2UE's Breakfast Show for four years and since 2018 has written non-fiction books, most recently The Devil's Work, an account of Jack The Ripper suspect Frederick Deeming.
He says his columns will cover current affairs, such as today's opening salvo on the Optus data breach, and his personal experiences.
The keen beach fisherman said he would write about "anything interesting I feel I can talk about", including personal issues such as the "struggle thousands of people are having around the country trying to keep elderly parents out of aged care".
"Stuff that touches on people's lives that they can identify with.
"I don't want them to feel like I'm a finger-wagging old white guy denouncing how bad the modern world is. Anyone could do that.
"Old white guys have been doing that for thousands of years."
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