Those of us born in the early 1960s have been nicknamed the Silent Generation or Generation Jones because we fall anonymously between the cracks of the narcissistic, navel-gazing Baby Boomers and the money-minded and materialistic Generation X.

We are too young to properly remember the summer of love and the Flower Power years but too old to be swept up in the hype of the technology age. Because of that, I don’t recall much about the Vietnam War yet seldom played a computer game. Hollywood doesn’t tend to make movies about us because we are neither Forrest Gump nor the Karate Kid.

At school, my gift was always writing, but not necessarily the kind that was required within the New South Wales curriculum. I would thrive with my creative stories, especially if they had a sports theme.

In primary school, I received top marks for a humorous rhyming poem that I crafted about a cricketer called Hopeless who’d eventually proved his doubters wrong by riding his luck to score 1000 runs in a single innings. Even before the age of 10, I seemed comfortable in the genre of sports’ writing and already planned a career as a journalist (if I couldn’t be a secret agent).

My father – a brilliant creator of short stories, radio & TV scripts and advertising storyboards – was my chief muse. I loved the way that he treated me as an artistic equal and encouraged me to try and come up with my own TV commercial outline.

When he said he would submit my script to his advertising agency, George Patterson, if it were good enough, I wholeheartedly believed him. The fact that I always called my father by his first name – ‘Neville’ – indicates the kind of warm and informal relationship that we had. We would sometimes meet for fancy breakfasts at a continental café in Wynyard Station near his office in Australia Square Tower after I had taken the 15-minute train ride over the Harbour Bridge.

It mattered little that my Dad didn’t share my passion for sport. Soon after my 15th birthday, I noticed that our local newspaper, the North Shore Times, didn’t carry any coverage of the area’s longsuffering Rugby League team, the North Sydney Bears. So, with my Neville’s help, I mailed off a letter and a trial weekly article to the sports’ editor, offering to be his Bears’ reporter.

To my delight, the editor responded and said he would give me a chance. “You can do it for free at first,” Neville told me. “And then we can ask for this…” he smiled, rubbing his fingers together as if they were stroking crisply printed bank notes. To be honest, my first articles were pretty rough but I can’t explain the excitement of seeing something I created in print, albeit without a by-line and sometimes with some major sub-editing. My first column was published on June 15th, 1977.

Thirty-five years later, I still get a buzz when I open up a magazine or newspaper to see my work. Each week, my father would type out my story on his Olivetti portable and I would take the train to the North Shore Times’ offices in Chatswood to drop off an envelope marked: ‘Urgent – Copy’.

Soon, I would start writing for other suburban papers including the Bennelong Bi-lingual, a publication that carried articles in both English and Italian, and the inner city’s Sydney Shout. It was an important first step in my career because as every young reporter will tell you: to have any work published is crucial in getting a full-time job.

Even as a 15-year-old, I knew that my goal was to land a coveted cadetship at the Sydney Morning Herald, which was Australia’s oldest and most respected newspaper. During the December school holidays, I took a trip to visit my relatives in the country town of Inverell, excited that I’d been a published journalist for a full half year and that my studies were also flying along.

Five days before Christmas on a balmy summer’s evening, I remember cycling along the sandy footpath from my grandmother’s place to my Uncle Arthur’s house less than one kilometre away.

When I arrived, Arthur was outside, standing around solemnly in a small group that also included my Aunty Jean. I knew something was terribly wrong.

“Neville’s dead,” he said.

They were two words that would change the rest of my life.

* Excerpt from Chasing Daisies Copyright 2012, autobiography of Jason Dasey, host and executive producer at Astro SuperSport