Joan Barfoot
speaker
58 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 3 Aug
Joan Barfoot’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh, all sorts of ways, I suppose.
just small things that I had a mother who read to me and a sister who read to me.
And I remember the magic day when I was about four and I looked at a book and I could read it all by myself and I just fell in love with words and wasn't that lucky that we actually had a book that I think was a child's version of Shakespeare or something really pretentious for a four-year-old.
There was that kind of nurturing that you really can't take for granted if you look around a bit.
Then I went into journalism when I basically got the boot from Western.
I mean, you may say I have a degree, and I do, but it was a paltry little thing by the time I got it.
But I went into journalism, and in those years as a reporter, I mean, people would always say, you must meet the most interesting people.
Well, yeah, you do.
But what is more to the point is that you tend to meet people, at least in the kind of reporting that I was doing, at real extremes.
So I mean, I had a summer job at the Free Press here.
And I think I was the only woman in the newsroom, naturally, in those days.
And I was working a Saturday morning.
Some guy wiped out his whole family.
He killed his whole family down around Chatham.
We found the dead wife's sister lived in Lucan.
They popped me in a cab, sent me up to Lucan to get the pictures.
And because even as an adolescent, sort of old adolescent, I was fairly ruthless, I took their whole photo album.
But I sat with that sister for an hour and a half.
I didn't actually care about deadlines at that point, because she was wrecked, because everybody had been wiped out.
But I took her photo album, and I didn't use hardly anything of what she'd said, because that wasn't why.
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