The closure of AustralianPolitics.com has been coming for some years. I've made every effort to keep it open but now I'm beaten.

WhitlamDismissal.com and Watergate.info have also been shut down. The YouTube channel is gone too. No doubt my online presence will persist in various forms but I've done my best to eliminate it.

Destitution has won. I can no longer provide for myself. The websites are collateral damage.

I've lived a life and completely mismanaged it. Now there's no job, no income, no home. I'm too old. I'm beset by loneliness and desolation. The future offers only dread and fear. Most of the time I wish not to wake up in the morning.

I don't blame anyone for this mess. I suspect I would also have sacked me. Mediocrity precluded making much of a go of anything else. Over time I've come to accept that I've never really been very good at anything. I was a plodder, at best.

The hardest part of all this is that I'm about to lose the little bit of my life that's still left.

Currently in storage, everything I've ever owned is about to go. This includes a fairly specialised library of about 4000 books, mainly biography, politics and history. There are two six-shelf bookcases with substantial collections of Whitlam and Watergate books. A massive collection of election ephemera going back nearly 50 years is simply irreplaceable. There are seven filing cabinets containing more political material and the detritus of an undistinguished three decades of teaching. And then there's the furniture, to say nothing of the personal and family memorabilia. I can't bring myself to think about what I'm about to lose.

Perhaps the greatest destruction is of a lifetime's beliefs. But enough emoting. Better to just quietly disappear.