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I am including in full an article by Jack Waterford about Bob's death, published in the Adelaide Advertiser.

I was a good friend of Bob's since I started at The Canberra Times in 1989 and we drifted apart, largely due to the relative chaos in our private lives. Bob's death comes as a shock, yet his health had been in decline for years.

Here is Jack's article.

Jack Waterford, Editor at large of The Canberra Times, issued a statement about Bob Ferris this afternoon. Here is the full text:

I am grieved to announce that Bob Ferris, a former senior journalist at The Canberra Times died this morning in a single-vehicle car accident in Narrabundah. The indications are that he had suffered some form of stroke before his vehicle left the road and hit a tree.

The news is the more upsetting because it follows by only three days the death of his former wife, Senator Jeannie Ferris from cancer.

Bob and Jeannie, who married in 1964 after both had crossed the Tasman for journalistic jobs in Australia had been divorced in the 1980s, but had remained good friends, and Bob had been regularly with her in her final days, and was helping organise her funeral.

Jeannie's memorial service is on Tuesday - Bob's funeral will not have happened by then, but inevitably the wake for Jeannie will now also involve fond memories of Bob.

Bob was born in New Zealand in December 1939 and began his career as a sports reporter with the Dominion, in Wellington in 1957, covering over the next few years major sporting events - rugby, cricket, soccer, tennis bowls and golf.

Later he became a general reporter, working in the New Zealand Parliamentary Press Gallery before taking a job as Chief Sub Editor of the Rotorua Daily Post - which is where he met and wooed Jeannie, then its women's editor.

He came to Australia in 1963, working as a feature writer, then sub-editor on the Sydney Telegraph. Over the next few years he worked at the Melbourne Herald, with the Sunday Times in Perth, and then at The Canberra Times where, in 1969, he became news editor.

After he left The Canberra Times, he worked for Max Newton on a host of his publications, not least as managing editor of the Sunday Observer in Melbourne. For a decade or more after that he operated a publishing business in Canberra, which ultimately failed in the early 1980s, before going to Adelaide for four years as a senior sub-editor on The Advertiser.

He returned to The Canberra Times in 1989, working variously for us as Chief Sub Editor, News Editor and Chief of the Reporting Staff during the early 1990s, and later, after notional retirement, as a casual senior-subeditor until 2004.

Bob was the complete journalist, with a fundamental understanding of all aspects of newspaper production and economics, but also a great eye for news, typography, design, and display. By contrast with some of the occasional chaos of his personal life, he was, in the newsroom, calm and steady even, or especially, when all about was bedlam.

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