But to understand David Crawford, you need to go back to his childhood and evenings around the dinner table when his father - a newspaper editor - would pick him to pieces.
"We used to be encouraged to go on holidays with friends and their families, but that was on the condition that we wrote a letter home each week. The worst day of the holidays was when I came home and my letter was sitting on the mantelpiece with red scrawls of crayon through it. That evening my father used to produce the letter and ask, "How do you spell this?" and "Why did you use five words here when you could have used three?" " Crawford tells The Weekend Australian.