When the Army moved in on Atherton, north Queensland, local publisher George Groom was less than impressed, writes Rod Kirkpatrick.

Somewhere in Australia’ was dateline when the ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ announced on May 28, 1943, that another Australian Army newspaper, ‘Table Tops’, had begun publication that week.

‘Table Tops’ would be published seven days a week in Australian and American editions, the SMH reported. It would be produced on the plant of “a country newspaper”. The editor was Major Cliff Cheong, the former editor of ‘AIF News’, published in the Middle East for three years until February, 1943. His assistant was Lieutenant Harry Grover, son of Monty Grover, the first editor of the Sydney ‘Sun’ (1910) and Melbourne’s ‘Sun News-Pictorial’ (1922).

“Somewhere in Australia” was Atherton, a town on the tableland inland from Cairns, and the “country newspaper” plant used to produce it belonged to George Groom, the owner of the ‘Tableland Examiner’, Atherton, the ‘Evening Advocate’, Innisfail, and the ‘Sunday Australian’, Cairns.

‘Table Tops’ is possibly the most unusual daily to have been produced in Australia’s regional centres from which 170 dailies have been published (see my previous column). It marched to the beat of a different drum.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Military Forces, General Sir Thomas Blamey, named the paper, just as he had named ‘Guinea Gold’, produced seven days a week in Port Moresby for Australian and American troops, from late 1942 to mid-1946. The Army was also producing a daily in Darwin, the ‘Army News’, when ‘Table Tops’ was established to serve three Army divisions stationed on the Atherton Tableland as the Japanese threat from the north loomed large.

Newspapers had begun appearing at Atherton in late November 1903 when Gilbert Kelly Jeffery had launched the ‘Atherton Chronicle’, using an oil drum filled with concrete as his first printing press. Some months later William Graham Henderson took over the ‘Chronicle’ and changed the title to the ‘Barron Valley Advocate and Atherton News’ from August 1904.

A cooperative launched the ‘Tableland Examiner’ on September 16, 1908, to push the labour cause, but a lack of cooperation soon led to the sale of the paper to a partnership that included various people with local and state political aspirations.

From July 1931, George Groom, publisher of the Innisfail paper, amalgamated the two Atherton papers as the ‘Tableland Examiner and Barron Valley Advocate’. Groom’s widowed mother had bought the ‘Johnstone River Advocate’, Innisfail, in August 1928, six years after he had lost what was supposed to be his inheritance. The Dunn family somehow split the Groom family and obtained control of the daily ‘Toowoomba Chronicle’, which the Grooms had owned since 1876.

When the Army got Atherton in its sights and zeroed in on Groom’s printing plant, it had little idea of the combativeness that it would stir up in the gritty newspaper proprietor. Copies of correspondence between Groom and the Army, obtained from the National Archives, reveal stubbornness on Groom’s part, and an admission from Major Cheong in May 1945 that “difficulty” in obtaining Groom’s full cooperation had been “experienced right throughout our tenancy” of the ‘Tableland Examiner’ premises in Atherton.

The tenancy began on May 17, 1943, and the Army produced the first issue of ‘Table Tops’ on May 23. Already, however, Groom was apparently peeved at having to vacate Atherton. When Major Cheong had visited Atherton, Groom had pointed out that he was aware “of the powers which the Army possessed to impress facilities it desired to obtain possession of, but from his point of view, the position was that the ‘Tableland Examiner’ had been a sound business during the period of his ownership and, since the arrival of such large numbers of troops in North Queensland its profits [and] earning capacity had shown a substantial rise”.

As a businessman, Groom had a different perspective from that of the Army and its public-relations goals. He was worried about the long-term future of his newspaper; about “the fairly certain prospect of the dissipation of some of our turnover”; about newsprint quotas (he sought and obtained the transfer of the ‘Tableland Examiner’ quota to his ‘Sunday Australian’, and he inserted editions of the ‘Examiner’ as a supplement to the Sunday paper); and about having no fallback position if his Innisfail plant were damaged by enemy bombing.

Groom initially hoped that “we would be employed as printers of the projected [Army] journal”, but when this opportunity did not arise, he offered to sell the Atherton plant for £2200 ($4400). The Army rejected both this and Groom’s proposal that he be allowed access to the Atherton press for sufficient time each week to produce the ‘Tableland Examiner’. It also objected to Groom’s implication in his letter to the Comptroller General of Customs that “duress was imposed on him to obtain his Atherton plant and premises”.

The Army agreed to pay Groom £65 ($130) a month to lease the Atherton premises and plant. [At war’s end, it paid him £533 ($1066) for damage to his equipment and for items that were missing, and £400 ($800) for the cost of re-establishing his Atherton business.]

The plant consisted of: “one double-demy Wharfedale; one Model 5 Linotype, equipped with seven-point type, and with 14-point Cheltenham condensed heading type; two platen presses; and the usual amount of equipment required for such an office”.

Major Cheong recommended that the Army buy additional plant, comprising a Linotype (Model 14); a split magazine font 14-point Cheltenham bold and light; a seven-point two letter font; a six-point two letter font; a flat stereo casting box; a mitring machine; two steel case type cabinets with ten fonts of suitable heading and display type; column rules, furniture and leads; an all-wave radio set; a bench saw; four setting sticks; and three printers’ em rules.