drudge plunges into the crypt in search of patterns, particularly a pattern for some nice gloves. Michael McDonald None of the small team of Echo drudges back then would have expected the paper to last so long and in fact be the last of the old paper newspapers left standing on the north coast. My association with The Echo began in its first year in 1986. I was the Tasmanian correspondent, filing whimsical stories of farm life, dubious doggerel and philosophical ramblings of an equally dubious nature, along with a cartoon series called ‘Swami Cootamundra says’, a single panel repeated each time with different tag lines purporting to be esoteric wisdom; some of which enraged readers.