Journalistic grit to get to the heart of the story, and an overwhelming desire to see the long-established official history corrected, drove Job to pit all her skills against overwhelming odds, both personal and systemic, to show that a company of engineers from NSW were among the first to land and the first to suffer casualties on that fateful day in 1915.

Anecdotal family history had always told that Job's maternal great uncle, Cleve Page, was among the first to join up, the first to land and the first to die when Australians joined the Great War in 1914. As Sapper number 70, Cleve was undoubtedly among the first to sign up, but it took dogged determination, painstaking research and the power of the internet for Job to prove that the 170 men of the First Company Engineers were in the bows of the first boats to land at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915. Heavily armed with rifles and bayonets, the sappers were also heavily laden with grappling hooks and wire cutters to clear the way through spiked pits and barbed wire barricades for the following 1500 infantrymen of the Third Brigade. They must have been easy targets for Turkish snipers. Job's story went to air on national television (60 Minutes - The First Wave) in 2015.

A career in journalism was an inspired choice for Catherine. She had always been deeply interested in the history of humanity, widely read on many topics and fascinated by humanity's ingenuity, its politics and its horrors. And her personality suited journalism. From an early age, she was strong-willed, determined, convinced about the correctness of the opinions she formed, and not afraid to express them. She joined the ABC as a cadet journalist in 1983 after graduating from Melbourne University in 1982 with a degree comprising science and environmental subjects.

She responded to an ABC advertisement in the national papers for cadet journalists and was chosen at interview by an intimidating panel of men in suits from a field of over 5000 applicants. She regarded her performance at that interview as among her finest moments.

Her immediate appointment was to work with legendary ABC journalist Tony Jones and colleagues on the flagship AM/PM/World Today current affairs radio programs. It was under their direction that she cut her teeth on interviewing style and presentation, and her reputation for getting to the heart of the story grew quickly. However, after two and a half years, Job's desire to "see the world" led her to buy a one-way ticket to London and to mix some freelance journalism with her personal interest in the history of the ancient world and its current trouble spots.

Returning to Australia in 1988, she picked up her career with the ABC and by 1989 she was running her own afternoon radio show in Brisbane with producer Deborah Fleming before transferring to anchor the 7:30 Report, a position she held during the dying days of the gerrymandered Bjelke-Petersen government and the many exposures of the Fitzgerald enquiry into police corruption. Her future seemed secure, but Job, in true Cathey Job style, had other career plans.

Job was born in Sydney on June 4, 1959, the second child to parents Esma Mary Page and George Macarthur Job, a First Fleet descendant of Lt (later governor) Philip Gidley King and of pastoralist Hannibal Hawkins Macarthur. Esma had graduated from Pharmacy College at Sydney University and had taken up the position of pharmacist with the Bush Church Aid Society at Ceduna in the far reaches of South Australia. In late 1954, she met the young pilot, Macarthur Job, later known for his work on air safety in Australia, and following a whirlwind romance, the two were married in Sydney in 1955 before returning to Ceduna to continue their work with the society. Their eldest child, Peter, was born in Ceduna in December 1957.

The family returned to NSW in 1959 and Mac became a spotter pilot for the blue fin tuna fleet out of Eden. They lived first in Merimbula, and then in Port Lincoln (following the tuna). Mac also set up his own firm and flew contract work in country NSW for a short time before joining the Aviation Department in Melbourne in 1964. There he edited the department's principal pilot safety education publication, Aviation Safety Digest (affectionately dubbed the "Crash Comic" by pilots generally).

Meanwhile, the Job family had grown in size with the birth of Catherine's younger siblings, Marion, Alex and David. They settled in Templestowe where Job attended the local primary and high schools. In 1972, together with her brother Peter, she qualified to attend the prestigious University High School in Royal Parade, Melbourne. In 1979, she was accepted to study science at the University of Melbourne. Here, her natural curiosity was fuelled with a wealth of options, and she followed her instincts from one subject to another over the following four years before graduating in science, a degree she had no intention of turning into a career. And that's when serendipity and inspiration stepped in and her career as a journalist began.

In 1990, Job's first brush with illness caught her by surprise. Investigation into a nagging back pain revealed a growth on her spine and an operation to remove this was undertaken. The operation was difficult with the result that although the growth was removed, a nagging back pain subsequently became part and parcel of her everyday living and ultimately brought her full-time career to an early end. Nevertheless, at this stage in the mid-1990s, she was riding high at the ABC but as hinted earlier, she was hatching a plan to try something unexpected.

In 2000, with a federal election coming up, one of her close contacts in Brisbane in the National Party let her know that David Kemp, then Minister for Education, Training and Youth Affairs in the Howard government in Canberra was looking for a media advisor. Job had for some time thought that she would like to "see an election from inside a major political party" to give her a better understanding of how the party developed its media strategy and handled major announcements in the lead up to an election.

She was an admirer of David Kemp as a man of integrity among his peers. He was elected to the Victorian seat of Goldstein in 1990, a seat he held until 2004. Job joined the Kemp office in 2000 and worked with him during the November 2001 election when Howard's conservative liberals narrowly beat Kim Beasley's Labor opposition. Catherine's plan had been to work with the Coalition during the election and when they lost as had been widely expected, to travel overseas to study for a Master's in Public Policy before coming back to Australia to take up her ABC career, following the footsteps of other senior ABC journalists such as Kerrie O'Brien and Barrie Cassidy. The unexpected win by Howard threw this plan into disarray and she decided to stay with Kemp in his new portfolio of Environment and Heritage after the election. Environmental issues were one of Catherine's interests, and the challenges of this portfolio were an incentive to remain in Canberra for a fascinating and deeply satisfying two more years before her debilitating back injury forced her into retirement in 2003.

Catherine Job is survived by her mother Esma and her siblings Peter, Marion, Alex and David and their families.