Leah Lambart: Welcome to another CGA career podcast. In this episode, we are talking about all things media and journalism. And today, I’m looking forward to interviewing Maddie Cloke who left Caulfield in 2014.

Maddie Cloke: Hi, thank you for having me.

Leah: Maddie, I’m not sure if you’ve listened to any of these podcasts before, but I always like to start from the beginning. You left school in 2014 and then went on to study a Bachelor of Professional Communications at RMIT. Can you tell us how you came to choose this pathway and a little bit more about the actual course that you studied and some of the content?

Maddie: Yeah, I mean, I always knew I wanted to get into media, it was a passion for me. I think I sat down with my mum in about year 10 and I said, this is what I want to do. I want to work in radio. That’s where I see myself and I really want to be in news. So I think the one bit of advice really, for any career that I have is LinkedIn is your biggest asset.

So I jumped on LinkedIn, and I looked at everyone who had the job that I wanted one day, and I looked at where they started. And I remember coming across a few women and men as well who were in spots that I wanted to be in and I saw they all had gone to RMIT and done either professional communications or a Bachelor of Journalism so it seemed like the logical pathway for me. I sat down and I had a look at the courses. I remember going to my career counselor and saying, these are the courses I want to do. What do I need to do to get here? I was pretty headstrong from year 10 that that was the course I was doing. I worked really hard and I got into it.

Leah: Can you tell us a little bit about some of the subjects that you studied as part of that professional comms course?

Maddie: Yeah, of course. Professional Communications, the reason I actually went with that over Journalism, as just a core, I guess, course, was because Professional Communications offered advertising, PR, media, and journalism as different subsets. When you get to your second year or your third year, you then get to specialize in one of those areas. For me, I kind of always knew I was going to specialize in journalism. But it kind of gave me the option in case I went, hang on, this isn’t the right pathway for me and maybe I do want to go into advertising or PR. But I’ve kind of stuck to my guns and ended up where I wanted to be.

Once I got to the second year, we kind of honed in a little bit more on what you need to be a journalist. I probably learned the most in my final year and my second last year. So it was three years. A lot of going out, it’s very hands-on at RMIT. So we were going out, filming, recording, doing voiceovers, talking to people on the street, trying to find out the story. We had a mock newsroom where we would simulate what a TV broadcast would look like. Likewise, a radio broadcast too. Writing wasn’t really my favorite thing. So that wasn’t exactly where I wanted to go. But broadcast was really where I wanted to be. Actually, I also did an exchange in the UK and went and did journalism over there for six months, which is really good because it gave me a chance to study for six months and then travel for six months afterwards as well. But I found it really interesting going over there because the university I went to had strong ties with the BBC. So we got to see a lot of what the inside of the BBC looked like. When I came back home, it kind of ignited the passion for me heading into year three, that I really needed to get a look in at some internships in my own country, and see where it was I wanted to go to next.

Leah: And I love the fact that you use LinkedIn to do all that research, even when you’re at school. I did a LinkedIn session with CGA Young Alumni just last week. I love the fact that you are, you know, backing up what I’ve been telling them about using it as a great research tool and, you know, potentially even reaching out to people.

Maddie: Yeah, and just building your network too, as well. I find even now, I’m five years into where I am, and I probably always have my LinkedIn tab open at work. I’m sure we’ll get into later what a bit about what my day looks like as a radio producer. But it’s one of my biggest assets. And you just you don’t understand how many people actually use it. I feel like even now speaking to friends, it’s almost second to Instagram or Facebook on your phone. Like you’re always constantly checking it to see what’s out there, what’s next, what people are up to.

Leah: Yeah. And look, I think you even approached me to come on 3AW, and I’m pretty sure you found me on LinkedIn.

Maddie: Yep. Yep. I think that’s right.

Leah: So the media is a really competitive industry and, you know, I’m really interested to know how you landed that first job after completing your course at RMIT.

Maddie: Yeah, I mean, I hustled pretty hard. I think anyone who tells you that you work in media, you can’t sit on your hands, you’ve got to get going. And I think the difference between those who end up with a job in media and those who don’t are those who put their hand up and work for free, which is an unfortunate thing that you have to work for free but you also learn a lot too.

So I think from memory my first kind of taste was I sat in at the Hot Breakfast with Eddie McGuire at the time, at Triple M for a couple of mornings, because a friend of mine knew a friend who knew a friend who worked there. So I sat down with their producer for a coffee, and then she said, why don’t you come and watch a few shows? And that just kind of opened my eyes and I went, wow, this is what I want to do. I’ll never forget when I was sitting there. I think it was the day that Eddie McGuire had announced, which never happened, announced that he was going to demolish the MCG or Marvel or something and build this whole big stadium. I went to a press conference with him and I’m standing there holding his bag. I was just watching him and afterwards he looked at me and he said, Maddie, I’ve got one bit of advice for you. Never answer the question and never look them in the eye.

That’s so funny. But yeah, from then on, I just thought, okay, well, I need to try some more places. I need to see what it is that I want to do. Because I knew it was always radio, but did I want to go to TV? So I got myself involved with SYN, which was the university’s youth radio station and worked on a program called Panorama, which is somewhat like a long-form news bulletin that you kind of control yourself. So you pick out the news. I’m pretty sure it’s still running. It’s been running for years. So I did that for a couple of weeks. And then I thought, oh, this is fun, but I want to get more into what’s really happening. So once again, I was on LinkedIn. And I saw that Channel 7 had an internship program that was working on the morning show and the daily edition, which is now I don’t think that show runs anymore. But at the time, it fed on after the morning show, which was the continuation of Sunrise. It was a four-week intensive internship up in Sydney.

So I was still studying at this point. So I applied for it and I was very happy when I got the call one day when I was out for a walk saying that, yeah, we’d love to have you if you want to come up. So I went to Sydney. I lived out there for four weeks, without knowing anyone. It was really, really fun. And just crazy. TV is, it’s a whole other base compared to radio. Radio sometimes I feel like radio is very immediate, but there’s a lot of planning that goes into TV, which is something I learned. And yeah, I learned a lot there. Then I came back and now my CV was starting to build. I had Triple M. I had this Channel 7 internship. I sent off a few different emails out to some people and one landed at SEN. So SEN is an AM kind of sports talkback radio station. I was working on the run home with Ox and Marco. I actually ended up, I do remember because I’m a Richmond supporter. It was 2017. It was right after we’d won our first flag. I was working all through that. So it was a pretty cool experience. I ended up staying there for three months working one day a week, which was really good. I was meant to originally only be two weeks, one day a week. And then it just kept going and going. I went to edit audio. I went to make podcasts.

I was given complete control over answering their phones. I made some really good friends. That kind of feeds into how I got my first job. I finished my final year, I did a bit of travelling. I knew I had some contacts at SEN. I actually emailed the Ox, David Schwartz, who is a former Melbourne player. I just said, hey, I am looking for work now. I finished up my course. Is there any chance, do you know, of anything happening around you? He said that we’ve actually moved to Macquarie Sports Radio, which was part of 3AW, which is now defunct. It didn’t last very long Macquarie Sports Radio, at the time, yeah, he said, why don’t you come and sit in? So I was sitting in on their new program there. I guess I just got tapped on the shoulder. They needed someone at 3AW. I was there. I started on as a casual producer. It kind of all just snowballed from there. I ended up there for, yeah, it took me now five years.

Leah: So from what I’m hearing, apart from the internship that you applied for in Sydney, most of those other opportunities you created for yourself.

Maddie: Absolutely. I think I did have one other internship I’m just thinking of now with Southern Cross Austereo that was kind of like a boot camp. We all went away to a regional town. We went to Albury for the weekend and there were 10 people who were chosen. They kind of threw you in at different areas and thought, yeah, you could kind of get a taste of different parts, whether it was you want to work in marketing, news reading, being a presenter, or also producing.

That was another one. But yeah, pretty much all the internships I got from messaging people and just not being afraid. I think when I messaged the Ox the second time to see if he had any work, I emailed him like four times until I got a reply. So you do feel like a pest, but you gotta remember these people have busy days and sometimes your email goes, oh, okay. I need to reply to that. Then it gets lost in the bottom of the inbox. If you just remind them and pull it back to the front without being pushy and just being nice, I think sometimes things, yeah, pull off.

Leah: Great advice. You can’t just assume that they’re not interested just because they don’t reply straight away. So well done for using your initiative. I just had a question, when you mentioned about the internship in Albury because I grew up in Wagga and, being in those sort of regional areas, I guess my understanding was that people who often start out in media, whether it’s radio or television or newspapers, used to always often go to country areas and country stations first to get that experience before moving to the city. In your experience, is that still I mean, I know you haven’t done that, but is that often the case still?

Maddie: Yeah, I was very lucky. So don’t look at my career and be like, oh, well, you don’t have to go regional. I was very prepared to go and live in the country. I actually applied for jobs in the country, but didn’t hear back. Sometimes it’s, there’s a weird thing in media where you need all the experience, but not having any experience for an entry level job. I think it’s the same in any career really, they want the most, but sometimes you can’t have all that.

So yeah, it’s banging on people’s doors, really, and making those connections that can make it easier to land your first job. But yeah, I was very lucky that I didn’t go regional. But for some people, they say that going regional has been like the grounding point of their careers and really set them up really well. So on one hand, I’m happy I didn’t do it. But on the other hand, I think it would have been a great experience and it might have changed the direction that I went in in the end. But yes, I wouldn’t say I have the most traditional media career going into the city and to the number one radio station in well, Melbourne and mostly Australia really.

Leah: Well, look there, I’m sure it was all through a lot of hard work. Not just luck, Maddie.

Maddie: Yes, that’s true.

Leah: So can you tell us a little bit more about what it is like to be a producer at 3AW? What does an average sort of day or week look like for you?

Maddie: Yeah, I guess I don’t have the most traditional job. Whenever I tell people, they’re like, what, what does a radio producer do? My day is mostly I spend a lot of time from so I start at 10 am in my role and I finish at 6, which is not traditional hours for a job as well. But they’re very good hours compared to that of a breakfast radio producer, which is 3:30 in the morning till 9:30 am, which is not for me. I’ve tried it a few times. But yeah, so when I get in at 10 am from 10 am till around midday, I will be reading the papers, reading my emails, I get a lot of pitches from PR, PR correspondence.

I am reading all the online news and kind of curating what we call a story list. There’s three people in my team, not including the host. And then we also have an audio operator, a panel operator. So with the three people in my team, we all create a story list. We’re kind of quietly working until midday. Around midday, we do an editorial meeting, which I guess is a fancy way of choosing what’s going on the program. We normally have a pretty heated discussion as with news. It’s a lot of opinions, and it’s kind of just a big roundtable debate with the four of us, including the host.

We’ll sit down and pitch our ideas to Tom. So Tom Elliott is the host of the program. You can get a feel, it’s kind of a smaller version of TalkBack Radio when you’re sitting around the table as to what’s going to stick and what isn’t going to stick with the audience. If we don’t really get a rise out of people, and we don’t have differing opinions, then maybe it’s probably going to fall a bit flat on ears. But if there’s a bit of banter, it can be funny. It doesn’t all have to be serious or if there are differing opinions. It’s always kind of a good sign that that topic is going to be a good topic for the day. It does help that us producers a lot of us are younger. We do often question Tom’s opinions at times, which can be very, very heated, but I think it makes for a more well-rounded show when you have people questioning behind the scenes. One thing you will find is a lot of the time behind the scenes, the producers are quite young. So it kind of does help.

If you ask any hosts, they’ll say they actually really value having a younger opinion against an older opinion because it makes for better radio. Then after that, from about midday to 3 pm until the program starts, we all kind of assign ourselves our own stories. We spend the day chasing our stories. When I say chasing, it’s somewhat like stalking people until you can get them to come on. As you said earlier, I’ve contacted you on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a great resource. Most if you’re going for like CEOs of companies or bigger company heads, they tend to have a media contact. You can get in contact with their PR people or their media people and pitch to them why you need their CEO to come on the program.

Same with government agencies as well, they often have media advisors that you can then pitch to. But more often than not, because 3AW really values local contact, it actually is just normal everyday people that we’re trying to contact. I spend a lot of time on Facebook messaging people, Instagram, LinkedIn, like I said, but also we get emails into through to our program. One thing I learned very quickly in radio is you can’t be afraid to pick up the phone. I feel like that’s something as a young person who probably is so used to texting when I was growing up, it was quite hard to transition into but now, I am not afraid to pick up my phone. Call someone. Often these people aren’t expecting a call as well. Sometimes they hear the word 3AW and think it’s bad news, but it can often most of the time, I would say 90% of the time it’s good news when I’m calling them not bad news.

Leah: I’m hearing like a lot of, you need really good research skills, you need really good communication skills and probably some influencing skills as well.

Maddie: Yeah. It’s funny, we often because we have a lot of young casual producers that come through, that come through our program, and we teach them. I was once the casual producer and then transitioned into full-time. Whenever I sit down

with some of our younger producers, I always tell them, the first thing you need to do is don’t um and ah on the phone because as soon as you give them any hint of, I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about, they become disinterested straight away, but always be polite. And you just got to remember that sometimes they could be in the busiest point of their day. Sometimes they’re in the busiest part of their career too, if it happens to be a big scandal or a massive launch of something new. Yeah, you just need to remember that their life doesn’t revolve around you. So we’ll book them in with a time. Then I will sit down with our host and brief him on the story that we had spoken about earlier in the meeting. This often involves me writing a script for how the interview will look, including an intro and about five to ten questions that I think would be good talking points for him. Then I find any kind of background information and put that into a dot point form. I make sure I’ve got Tom across all the different angles, what this person’s opinion is.

Leah: It sounds like you have to be really thorough in your preparation.

Maddie: Definitely. Sometimes a lot of getting guests on. For Tom, he does this every day. So for him, I don’t really need to explain to him how to do it. But for the guest, it can be the first time people or and the last time people will speak on radio. Often people do get really nervous and you kind of need to, I guess, massage their ego a bit to make sure that they’re good to go and they understand exactly how it works but really at the end of the day it’s just a conversation on the phone.

Leah: That’s so interesting. And once you’re on air, does it get more fast-paced?

Maddie: Oh, absolutely. Everything that I’ve just said can go out the window in a second. I can’t tell you how many times I would say it happens probably one to two times a week where we have organized a full program and then at 3 o’clock, breaking news happens and everything that I’ve spent my whole day doing that’s out the window. We start again from fresh. For example, just at the end of the lockdowns, I mean, I worked through, I started my full-time job in February 2020. We went into lockdown in March. So I’ve worked through pretty much the pandemic, I did not work from home. I worked in the office every day. But when we had the riots happening in the city, I’m sure you probably all remember the crazy scenes that were coming out of that. We had a whole show planned and then all of a sudden, we had people walking over the West Gate Bridge.

We’re like, what do we do? What do we do? So you have to really be cool under pressure in radio, which is something it’s, I think it’s valuable for any career really, but very much so in radio, you need to be calm, level-headed and be okay if things don’t happen. The more you panic, the more you fret, the less likely you are to get the next story up on air. So as long as you can be cool and calm, you jump on Twitter, you look at who’s there, you message them, you ask them to come on air and you kind of try and get the story from the ground and then you work around that. So, okay, we’ve spoken to X person who is really angry at the riot, they’re angry and the reason they’re protesting is at this union head. Okay. Well, we need to then speak to the union. Then from there, you get Talkback callers and the show kind of grows around that. So I never worry too much if everything falls through because you always know that the callers are gonna then drive where we go next.

Leah: That’s so interesting. I never would have known about that approach. Another little secret that I’ve sort of come to be aware of, doing a few radio and TV things, is that often the interviews are prerecorded even though they appear to be live. Is that something that every radio station does or is it just to fill in gaps? Why do they do it that way?

Maddie: Not through AW. We don’t really have any prerecorded content. Not unless the Queen wants to be interviewed and then we’ll make an exception. But I would say majority of the time, we don’t. And that’s something we really pride ourselves on. I know a lot of other radio stations prerecord a lot of their segments. It’s because we rely so heavily on talkback callers. There’s not many. I mean, there’s really only us and the ABC that are the talkback stations that are left these days. So people like to have their say and they like to have it right then and now and it just sounds better when it’s live because people like to hear people make mistakes. It’s funny, you get banter out of it but yeah, we operate on a 10-second delay at our radio station. So we have 10 seconds to work out if anything doesn’t pass the media code and if you don’t hit that dump button in time then you’re calling legal pretty quickly to work out what you can do to rectify it.

Leah: Wow, that sounds intense. But also exciting. My finger would be hovering over that dump button all the time.

Maddie: Oh, it is. My finger hovers over the dump button, I would say for 90% of the program. I’ve used it more times than I’d be willing to say. We have a thing called word delete. So you can delete just a word, which also operates on the 10-second delay, or you can have a 10-second dump, which means the last 10 seconds of the program, it kind of goes, yeah, it gets rid of the last 10 seconds of the program and goes like this and joins the other bit. So that middle bit never happened. But yeah, you can delete words. I mean, you wouldn’t know how many times Tom has just accidentally sworn, for example.

And you’re like, oh God, you’re an idiot. Delete. But a lot of things where you deal with too, in the live radio aspect, are things like defamation, particularly with breaking court cases that are happening. I know with the William Tyrrell case that was happening, we had to be really sensitive around the words that were used when they were talking about charging people who were associated with the case. You had to make sure that you weren’t using sensitive words. Also once you have a child in a crime, there’s a whole other set of media codes. We don’t really have the luxury of TV where they can sit down, write the script, make sure it’s all perfect. We’re kind of going on the fly, especially if this news breaks or as it happens. So yeah, that’s one thing where you need to be really prepared with. We definitely use our legal team as a crutch just to call them if we have done anything wrong. A lot of things with defamation, you can actually cover things by apologizing or retracting what you said on air, but not actually retracting it.

Leah: Wow, it sounds like you have to be very careful and very quick. What else do you handle in live radio?

Maddie: We also deal with a lot of traffic issues that happen at the time so I’m constantly in contact with the Department of Victoria Police and Ambulance Victoria are always people that I’m messaging just to get across everything. We’ve always got people calling. Often people call us before they call emergency services, which we’re often like, please hang up the phone, call emergency services, and then you could call us back. But people use us as a lifeline and a bit of a crutch. So we, yeah, we gotta be prepared for anything really.

Leah: Is that because they think they’re gonna win a prize? They will focus on the prize and save a life?

Maddie: That’s absolutely it. We have a thing called word on the street on our program, which is I guess it’s exactly what it says. It’s word on the street. But it can be anything from a rumor to a traffic incident, to a fire and then we give the best kind of news tip-off a prize at the end of the day and we give a car away at the end of the year.

Leah: That’s a pretty good prize. So, Maddie, apart from holding Eddie McGuire’s bag, what have been some of your other big highlights?

Maddie: Well, when I first started, I actually started working. I was a football producer for the AFL. I did that for a year before I got into the Monday to Friday programs. My idol growing up was Matthew Richardson. I remember I sat down on my first day in a boardroom meeting with all of these ex-football players and I was sitting next to him and he was talking to me about his recent trip and I’m like, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m here. So I think little moments like you, there have definitely been moments where I felt starstruck. But you also kind of realized pretty quickly, people are just people like you. But it was a great experience sitting up in the box while the team was calling the game.

The way that live commentary works is pretty amazing if you ever get a chance to see it or if you ever kind of see how it works in the background. That was really fun working on that for a year, a little late night. So I probably, and I guess the other thing I’d say is working through the pandemic, I don’t think there will ever be a time in our lives again that is as wild and unexpected as the pandemic. I can’t even tell you how we were working in the city every day during that and I had to have identification papers to even get to my job. People were calling us after they’d lost their jobs. We became, you know, not just an entertainment radio station, but also, yeah, a lifeline for a lot of people.

We were solving a lot of people’s issues, trying to help people get their assistance packages from the government. So I think also just being there and watching the press conferences every day and being like, oh God, we’re locking down in an hour. And we had to be the people to communicate that to everyone in Australia. Well, everyone in Melbourne. That was pretty wild. When I look back on it now, I’d never worked as hard in my life as I have in those two years. Particularly in the really, really hard lockdowns. Struggling to make three hours of content when there’s nothing happening in the world as well. Light and uplifting content too is really hard when the world is kind of burning around you.

Leah: Yeah. And there wasn’t really anything to talk about other than the pandemic.

Maddie: Yeah. And we had started in the bushfires. I mean, I was working the day, and I think one of, actually you said one of the best moments. I remember I was working on the day of those crazy bushfires in Mallacoota. We had a call from a young man and his young family, sorry, and they were trapped. They had two young babies. One was about two years old and the other one was a newborn, about three months old. They were stuck.

They didn’t know what to do. We were taking his call off air. Not all this stuff didn’t even end up happening on air. Then I’m on the other end, I’ve got SES trying to help fire rescue Victoria. In the end, we actually ended up from the background, we ended up getting him an airlift to safety. None of this ended up going on air, but I feel like almost we felt like we were a massive part of helping this person get out and get back home safely. So there’s little moments like that, where you feel, you feel like you’ve made a bigger difference.

Leah: Definitely. Working in media, you know, sounds very glamorous. Are there some drawbacks that people should be aware of?

Maddie: Yeah, it’s definitely got a glamorous title. It’s nowhere near as glamorous as the title. Every time I tell someone I’m a radio producer, they’re like, oh, wow. And I’m like, it’s really not that different from anyone else’s day-to-day job. There are definitely lots of fun and cushy things that come with it. You know, you get to go to an opening night of a movie or opening night of a play or something like that. You also get to be in this really fast-paced different environment. I guess some of the drawbacks to me is it’s very day-to-day.

You never really have any long-term projects. So my day starts at 10, it finishes at 6. I guess it’s a luxury that I don’t take any work home with me. But when I start the next day, it’s a clean slate. There’s no carryover of any projects really, not unless it’s a long-running news story, but my day is very much structured the same way every day. Yeah, it’s kind of short-term goals. So you almost get short-term. You kind of end up feeding off this adrenaline satisfaction of short-term goals. So when the longer things happen, it doesn’t feel as big. I’m trying to think of any other drawbacks. I guess longevity would be another thing. It’s very tiring. I think if you speak to a lot of people to hear if somebody’s been in, in journalism or in the media for, you know, 20, 15 years,It’s a lot more than it sounds because it is really gruelling every single day, making sure you’re across all the news.

I know I said before we were working on the bushfires, we went into the pandemic, we then went into that mini earthquake, then we went into the Ukraine war. So there’s always something. And I feel like, especially in what I do, we focus a lot on the negativity, not so much on the positive things that happen in the world. So that can definitely kind of have its toll on your mental health, I guess.

Leah: And I guess for some people, particularly if they’re working in TV or breakfast radio, those hours, I can’t imagine doing those hours for 20 years.

Maddie: Yeah. I mean, one of my friends at work, he’s been working in breakfast radio for 14 years now. He just lives his life backwards compared to everyone else. He sleeps in the day and he works at night, really. He’s up at 2 am and he finishes at 9:30, 10, which is just while we’re all sleeping, he’s making it all happen.

Leah: Yeah, that’s incredible. I just don’t understand how they can have a social life.

Maddie: It definitely is hard. I admire anyone who works in any kind of breakfast TV or radio and especially while you’re young to have a social life on that too. I guess another drawback now that I’m saying it is I worked really hard when I was really young and I sacrificed a lot of things to get to where I am. So I remember one year, the year of 21sts, I missed quite a few 21sts because I was working as a football producer, which was amazing in its own, but I was working till midnight every Friday Saturday, and then working all day Sunday. So there was no time to be out partying. I guess I’m kind of making up for that in the back end now. But yeah, you do have to let go of a lot of things and a lot of your social life if you really want to get there. And I think that may be what separates a lot of people getting to where they want to get to in the end.

Leah: Yeah, you mentioned earlier about regional, going regional, a lot of my friends who did my uni course with me, you know, they uprooted their whole lives. That’s a big sacrifice as well living in a regional town where they don’t necessarily know anyone, for a couple of years.

Maddie: Yeah, huge sacrifice.

Leah: What other advice would you have to a young person thinking about a career in radio, Maddie?

Maddie: Say yes to everything. I think it goes without saying, but if anyone has any kind of opportunity, make sure you say yes. I guess my other bit of advice would be when somebody asks you if you do happen to get somewhere where there is an open door, always give somebody two options of what you want to do because chances are that they will be able to help you with one of them. And try not to be too tunnel visioned in I only want to be a news reporter or I only want to be a producer because it pays to have a really well-rounded career and not to kind of pigeonhole yourself, especially in the media where it is quite a small industry.
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To have multiple skills in different areas is really valuable, especially now that we’re looking at multimedia journalists. I know it’s big at the ABC and a lot of places in 9 as well. You need to be able to file for radio news, do a TV package and write an article and get that all done for every story that you’re doing. In the past, there would have been one person for the article, one person for the radio, one person for the TV. The more well-rounded you can be the better.

Leah: Great advice. I have learned so much from chatting with you for the last 40 minutes. So thank you so much, particularly for taking time out on your holidays.

Maddie: No. That’s all good.

Leah: Best of luck with whatever you do next, Maddie, and we will look forward to perhaps speaking to you again in the future.

Maddie: No worries. And well, to anyone who’s at Caulfield, enjoy it because I can’t believe it’s been eight years since I’ve been there or seven years, I think now. So it’s crazy but it’s it really is the best years of your life.