They don’t have country newspapers like that any more, do they? Run by the one family for three generations or more and printed on the family’s own press, with a bunch of employees who have served 30 years or more? It’s a common question, with the death knell sounded for many such papers swallowed up by corporate giants, the size of their staff slashed, and the printing shifted to a press in a distant provincial city.

But some of the old, family-run, locally printed newspapers still do exist. One is the Tumut & Adelong Times, run by the fourth generation of the Wilkie Watson family, in southern NSW. Several more exist in Victoria, at Shepparton, Bairnsdale and Donald.

This time I’ve focussed on the Yorke Peninsula Country Times, run by the third generation of the Ellis family, at Kadina on South Australia’s Copper Coast, so named because the discovery of copper in the district in 1861 led to the development of a number of towns, particularly Kadina, Wallaroo and Moonta. By 1865 a population of 8000 was working around the mines.

From busy Port Wallaroo, twins David and Andrew Fyfe Taylor and George Thompson Clarkson launched the Wallaroo Times on February 1, 1865, as a biweekly. This was the first of the 11 titles started in five towns that have become part of the heritage of today’s Yorke Peninsula Country Times, which boasts it is ‘read all over The Leg’ (as the peninsula is known).

Today Kadina and Wallaroo have public buildings that reflect the grandiose thinking of the copper age and the newspaper itself has a touch of grandness about how it is housed and functions. Since November 2008, the Times has operated from a former bakery in Goyder Street, Kadina – premises which have been remodelled into an exciting newspaper building with intelligent location of the various departments; a home that offers ‘space and light and comfort’.

Various branches of the founding Taylor family owned the title from 1865 to 1963, known as the Wallaroo Times from 1865-88, and Kadina and Wallaroo Times from 1888. In 1872, the Yorke’s Peninsula Advertiser was launched in Moonta, which had two papers for 32 years from 1890, when Thomas Walter Franklin Stratton launched the People’s Weekly.

Cecil John Green Ellis (1902-1982), the ninth son and 11th child of a Moonta copper miner, started work as a printer’s devil at the People’s Weekly in 1916 when it was owned by J.T. Hicks and R.J. Hughes. In 1948 Hughes’ son, Hugh, took in Ellis as a partner and sold out to him in 1954. Meanwhile, Ellis had become the only one of his father’s nine sons to produce a son. That son, Trevor Francis (b. 1939), joined the People’s Weekly as an apprentice compositor in January 1954, when it had dwindled to four pages and had a print run of only 800.

Trevor Ellis remembers that when he entered the office his father pointed out ‘The Creed’ hanging on the wall:

‘That I shall come each day to my tasks,/
Eager and glad to work./
Grateful for the accomplishments of the past,/
But mindful always that today demands the best that is in me.’

Trevor still knows it today.

The only electricity the People’s Weekly used was for four light globes. The guillotine was operated by hand, the type set by hand, and the two small jobbing presses were powered by pumping your leg up and down, while the aged newspaper flatbed press was powered by a giant Blackstone oil engine, easily the heaviest machine in the office.

To deliver the newspapers, Trevor would ride his pushbike, with 100 or so papers, to the Moonta Mines where many of the miners’ cottages were occupied by elderly widows. Many would ask him to empty the buckets of ash they had gathered in cleaning out their wood stoves and fireplaces. Several of the widows would also ask him to do their shopping on Saturday morning.

Cecil Ellis took Trevor into partnership at the Weekly in 1958. Father and son built up the newspaper and printing business and bought the Kadina & Wallaroo Times in 1963, incorporating what was then the Moonta People’s Weekly into it in April 1966. The Kadina-based South Australian Farmer – owned by Horace Weir Tossell and his wife Grace –merged with the Kadina, Wallaroo and Moonta Times in August 1968, and the Ellises then created the Yorke Peninsula Country Times, first issued on September 4, 1968. The next step was to swallow in 1970 the Southern Yorke Peninsula News Pictorial, which had resulted in 1969 from the amalgamation of the Maitland Watch and the Southern Yorke Peninsula Pioneer.

When Michael Craig Ellis (b. 1964) joined the YPCT in early 1982, he was welcomed as the third-generation of the ownership dynasty and soon became a partner. Beginning as an apprentice compositor, he was given experience in each area of the newspaper business. At Christmas 1992, Trevor Ellis announced that Michael would be the next managing editor, and over the next few years, gradually handed over the reins.

Michael, now 48, loves his job: He lives out The Creed, coming each day to his tasks, eager and glad to work. He sees the newspaper as being extremely “worthwhile”.

The Ellises outsourced their printing to Port Pirie from 1968 until they installed a web-offset press in the former ‘Farmer’ office at Moonta in late 1979. Since then they have printed their own newspaper, although they shifted the press to Kadina in October 2004 as the first step in making the former Price’s Bakery their headquarters.     

Tuesday is the only day the press runs; it comprises two towers, one tricolour and one mono unit, and is able to print 32 pages (20 in colour), in one pass. Apart from printing their own paper (it never dips below 48 pages and often exceeds 56), often in three runs, the Ellises have for more than 20 years printed the Plains Producer, Balaklava, for the Manuel family. They also print a monthly for the Two Wells district.

The longest serving Times employee, Dennis Gill (69) has been there 55 years, and Wayne Rivers is next with 40 years. Production manager Ian Shaw (31 years) says he feels like a shareholder and rides “the emotions that working in the newspaper industry bring, upbeat when things are running smooth and the paper is healthy, and a little down when things are tough.”

Jodee Cavenett, accounts manager (29 years), says all the employees enjoy working for the family-run business. “I think we feel it is ‘our’ business, too, and even when the boss is away, everyone knows their job and keeps the paper coming out weekly.”

Editor for the past three years has been Amie Brokenshire, formerly of the Victor Harbor Times. She grew up at Mount Compass and graduated in journalism and arts from the University of South Australia. She is assisted by a full-time reporter and two cadets and a part-time sub-editor and part-timer reporter.

The YPCT introduced a digital edition in September this year and immediately built a pay wall around it. The subscription is much the same as for the hard copy. Ellis hopes many of the 450 subscribers who are mailed their copy of the YPCT will become digital subscribers. Circulation of the weekly is about 8500, up by more than 1000 over the past 30 years.

Will the Ellis family ownership at the YPCT extend into a fourth generation? Ellis does not know, but he and wife Kaylene have three sons – aged 20, 18 and 16 – a fact which gives them at least an inkling of hope.