Equally significantly, though I didn't realise it at the time, I'd somehow been inveigled into going to Cairns for a State Primary Schools' Cricket carnival at the end of 1982. That little jaunt meant that I was sticking my hand up for the Manager's gig with the 1983 North Queensland team.
When I arrived in Bowen in 1984 I immediately found myself landed with the District and Zone coaching role with the School Cricket. Figuring that you couldn't do the School-kid thing without being involved with the local Junior Cricket as well, I found myself with plenty to do on the weekend between August/September and Easter each year.
Once Easter rolled around and we'd held the annual Junior Cricket break-up an inclination to do nothing, put your feet up and please yourself for a while was probably an understandable reaction. As a result, visits to Townsville became increasingly rare, and when they did occur I was more likely to be standing around a cricket field than browsing through the racks in a record store.
Things on the musical front weren't a complete wipe-out, however. In 1987, armed with a windfall from the punt I'd shelled out for a CD player, and though, like everybody else, I bought a substantial chunk of my record collection over again, there was enough interesting new stuff to keep my bank balance down.
The need to keep track of what was coming out also got me back into buying music magazines. I'd stopped buying them, apart from the occasional Rolling Stone when I'd left Townsville, due to the increasing disparity between what the magazines were writing about and what Hughesy was listening to, but by the early nineties, with the flood of reissues coming out on CD buying some appropriate reading matter was a matter of necessity.
The first one I'd found was Q, which was bulky enough to give me something to read apart from the CD reviews, but a trip south to attend a wedding found me needing something to read on the way back, and the newsagent in Brisbane's Roma Street Transit Centre had a copy of Mojo, which seemed worth investigating.