A card table provided the artwork paste-up area when Margaret Falkiner (Wilkins) launched the first edition The Melbourne Trading Post newspaper on November 7, 1966. One typewriter, one phone, four kids underfoot. The eight-page newspaper first appeared fortnightly with a small collection of For Sale ads, sourced mainly from neighbours and friends.

“Fifty thousand copies of The Trading Post will be distributed throughout Melbourne, and as the number of ads in each edition increases, more copies of the paper will be published,” said the front-page announcement in the first edition. (A 1966 company brochure identified the first issue circulation of 10,000 copies. A cover price of 5 cents was introduced after four issues. Sales soon reached 1000 copies.)

(In the early 1970s, I was working part-time at Dern Langlands’s Regal Press. He briefly tried a lookalike Melbourne Trading Time newspaper, following on from the Melbourne Bazaar publication. It did not last.)

The Trading Post did grow! For some years, the paper – mainly printed at Standard Newspapers, Cheltenham – grew to average 168 pages each week. And it spawned other editions including Things That Go, as well as country and interstate versions.

The newspaper will built on trust: you don’t pay until you sell.

A 1996 brochure published by the proprietors, marking 30 years, noted a circulation of 112,000 copies a week, readership of 350,000, and a total of 42,000 ads

The Trading Post became such a success that it was taken over in 1998 by Trader.com in the heady days of internet takeovers. The Melbourne Trading Post and The Personal Trading Post (Brisbane) were acquired. Similar Sydney and Adelaide titles were brought into the Trading Post Group in 2001, with an aggregate 1.8 million ads handled per year. The company reported a turnover of $29 million in the year 2000.

In March 2004, Telstra stunned the stock market with its announcement that its Sensis group would take over the Trading Post business from the Dutch Trader Classified Media NV for a cash consideration of $636 million.

As is often the way with big company takeovers, within five years, The Trading Post print versions announced that they were going out of business. The company blamed the internet for its failure,

In Melbourne, the Leader and Star groups each tried their own Trader newspapers. Our company attempted a Melbourne Trader section in our Melbourne Observer weekly newspaper. Former Fairfax executive Stuart Simson foreshadowed a publication called Trading Mart, but it never reached print. Another paper, Trader Tag, lasted some years with Melbourne and Brisbane versions, before they too evaporated.

• I had no professional connection with The Melbourne Trading Post.