When you dig for dailies, you need to dig deep. You need to excavate. Just as well I’m talking of country dailies, isn’t it? We have bigger diggers in the backblocks – but frailer dailies.
I’ve been digging for these dailies for a decade or more as I have been trying to draw up a comprehensive list of the country dailies in every Australian state and explore their history.
I thought my digging-for-dailies days were done five years ago when my tally was 167 dailies in 78 centres. But, no, since then I’ve discovered (with some help from others) three more dailies in three centres, each in a separate state.
That brings the total to 170 dailies in 81 provincial towns or cities, with New South Wales leading the field with 29 centres followed by Victoria (19), Queensland (18), Western Australia (eight), Tasmania (five), and South Australia (two). The most prolific centres have been Ballarat (ten dailies), Bendigo (nine) and Newcastle (eight).
Gold and other mining, especially in Victoria and Western Australia but also in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, led to a dash to daily publication in centres that are now almost ghost towns. One classic example is Coolgardie (WA).
Let’s examine two of my recent discoveries: Meekatharra (WA) and Colac (Vic.).
Meekatharra (WA)
In the early days, Meekatharra (‘place of little water’) was a prolific gold-producing town, and that is why daily newspaper publication was attempted there from 1918. The town, 764km north-east of Perth, has now become a service centre because of its central location for smaller surrounding towns.
When the weekly Meekatharra Miner was launched on August 7, 1909, it was with great fanfare: two copies of the first issue were printed on pink silk and one on cream silk. It was the town’s first newspaper, although there had been a newspaper, the Murchison Advocate, launched at Cue, about 100km south, on September 3, 1898.
The Battye Library, part of the State Library of Western Australia, was given one of the silk issues of the Miner only a few years ago and lists it among its “treasures”. It says that it was common for WA newspapers in the early years of the 20th century to produce a few copies of the first edition on cloth, in addition to the usual paper copies. “Usually printed on silk or cotton, they are a beautiful and enduring memento of the birth of a newspaper,” the Battye website says. The most common colours used were pink, blue and cream.
Particularly fine examples are the Camp Chronicle: the Soldiers’ Paper, published every Thursday at Midland Junction, 1915-18 (special edition of first issue on blue cloth); the Meekatharra Miner, as mentioned above; and the Mount Morgans Miner (only the special cloth issue is held because the printing plant was destroyed by fire).
The first issue of the Meekatharra Miner carried a welcome from the local Federal Member, Hugh Mahon, the Minister for Home Affairs in the Fisher Ministry defeated two months earlier. Mahon said the first number of a town’s first newspaper marked the beginning of local history. “With its issue begins the collection of material from which our successors may discover something of the lives – the hardships, reverses and successes – of those who pioneered this region and planted the standard of civilisation on its inhospitable plains,” he wrote. The newspaper was a means, he said, of attracting population to a new town and was therefore of “the first importance”.
In 1915 Daniel James Colgan, who had been editing papers on the Murchison for nearly 19 years, bought the Miner. Three years later he sold his small weekly when the Telegraph Printing & Publishing Co. was formed to launch the Daily Telegraph.
The company began publication with no debt and a reasonable amount of working capital. It had no rent to pay and now owned a Double Royal cylinder machine and a six-month supply of news-printing paper. The company said it would be able to pay dividends from its inception because an audit had shown that the Miner had been making a profit of more than £12 ($24) a week.
The Daily Telegraph and North Murchison Gazette with which is incorporated the Meekatharra Miner began publication on July 8, 1918, two days after the final issue of the Miner.
For the life of its daily issue – until September 24, 1921 – the Daily Telegraph appeared five days a week in quarto bulletins, as well as publishing a weekly broadsheet summary of its previous five issues. At no stage did it publish on Sundays, but the publication day for the broadsheet varied from Friday (18 months) to Thursday (four months) to Wednesday (one month) before returning to Friday (two months).
From September 30, 1921, the paper continued publication as a weekly or bi-weekly until January 31, 1947, although retaining the Daily Telegraph title throughout.
Colac (Vic)
Colac is the centre of a rich agricultural and forestry region located on a volcanic plain between Geelong and Camperdown, with the Great Ocean Road and the picturesque Otway Ranges in easy reach. Four newspapers had been started at Colac by 1902 when its first and only daily appeared. The four were the Colac Observer (1866-1874), the Colac Herald (1869-now), the Colac Times (1875-1878) and the Colac Reformer (1878-1949). The Herald has been the success story, incorporating the Reformer in 1949 after that paper had incorporated the Times in 1878.
With the financial backing of a local medical practitioner, Joseph Gillis Wynne, the Colac Daily News was launched on March 24, 1902, with journalist James Cleary Roach as printer and publisher. Roach felt the time was ripe for a third paper in Colac, “taking into consideration the marvellous strides the town and district have made within the past few years”.
He added: “...we have certainly not embarked precipitately and without careful deliberation upon an enterprise fraught with the weighty issues and responsibilities that naturally attach to the publication of a daily newspaper.”
Wynne sold his interest some months later and Roach ceased publication on October 20, 1903, after his plant and machinery had been seized by the bailiffs. Six months later he was declared bankrupt.
The main reason the Colac Daily News had slipped beneath my radar until now was that there are no microfilmed files. The available files are in hard copy in six packages held at the Ballarat stores depot of the State Library of Victoria. Each issue is folded and so fragile they threaten to disintegrate even with the gentlest handling, making it extremely difficult to study them in detail.
I viewed them in the Heritage Collection Room at the library in Melbourne, checking in particular that the paper did actually appear at least five times a week. Several country papers in WA included ‘Daily’ in their title but did not achieve that in practice.
• Next issue: Atherton and the army daily that took charge of the local presses.
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