Remembering that I’d actually bought everything on my playlist with cold hard cash I thought I was already playing something decent. Mileages obviously vary.
The long and short of it was that I pulled the pin as head honcho before the annual general, didn’t go to the meeting and found an excuse to disappear from the airwaves.
Prolonged exposure to the North Queensland sun had taken its toll, and a visit to the doctor resulted in an attempt to remove a melanoma from my neck. The biopsy revealed that the first attempt hadn’t got all of it, and while a second procedure looked to have succeeded, it left me with a temporary irritation in one ear lobe that meant I was uncomfortable wearing headphones, which were an inescapable part of driving the thing.
Fine, I thought. I’ll take a little break, see if it clears up, and if it does and it looks like people are missing the show I can make the big come back.
Predictably, my disappearance from the airwaves was met with a resounding silence, and although I picked up the odd comment here and there over the ensuing years I found that I liked having Sundays to myself.
Still, I suspect when it happened the end of Hughesy’s broadcasting career took a couple of people by surprise. If it did, there’s a straightforward explanation, They probably thought that I’d become involved with the station due to an interest in community radio as such.
Wrong....
The reality was that I’d spotted an opportunity to end the sense of isolation that had characterised The Wilderness Years. I’d given it a couple of years to see how things worked out, and once I realised that I wasn’t going to end up finding the sort of personal interaction with like-minded individuals it was a matter of finding a convenient excuse to make an exit.