Some of Australia’s pioneering newspaper publishers and printers are remembered only vaguely, often in imprecise and incorrect detail. They are in danger of gradually fading from historical memory even as the inscriptions on their headstones fade into illegibility.

Thomas Strode, a pioneering printer in four Australian colonies, falls into that category. He has a faded headstone in Boroondara cemetery in Kew, Victoria, and the biographical record is incorrect about the Englishman’s date and place of birth, and vague and sometimes incorrect about his work and movements within Australia.

Most records claim he was born at Taunton, Somerset, in 1812 and some that his Australian printing career began after he disembarked “in Adelaide in 1836”. In fact, he was born at Shepton Mallet, Somerset, on June 20 the previous year, and disembarked from the barque Rifleman in Hobart Town on November 9, 1832. He said he was “immediately engaged on the True Colonist newspaper, where I remained until the ensuing March [1833], when I left for Sydney”.

He apparently served a printing apprenticeship at Taunton and gained significant experience in the trade in London. In Sydney he quickly became printing overseer at the recently-launched Sydney Herald, which he joined “the day after my arrival” and stayed until 1838. During that time, he married Mary Margaret Emma Hitchcock, spinster, in the Scots Church (May 16, 1836), with influential colonial figure the Rev John Dunmore Lang officiating. She would bear him 13 children over 21 years in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, six of whom died before they were four years old.

In January 1838, John Pascoe Fawkner, a former convict and the publisher of the second Launceston paper (estab. 1829), launched the first Port Phillip District newspaper, the Melbourne Advertiser, in manuscript form initially but printed later. It survived only 17 issues because Fawkner had not legally registered the publication in Sydney, the capital of the colony.

A brilliant 18-year-old, George Arden met Strode in Sydney and they decided to combine to launch the first legally published Melbourne paper, the Port Phillip Gazette. As a point of honour, Strode informed NSW Governor Sir George Gipps, of his plans. The Governor responded: “By all means go, for before many years elapse, Melbourne will be the metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere.” Sir George also told Strode that, if he stayed, there could be no doubt as to his appointment as NSW Government Printer, but he would still be only a servant of the public, subject to dismissal, whereas if he went to Melbourne he would be his own master.

Arden and Strode had difficulty obtaining a plant for their pioneering new venture in Melbourne because the master printers in Sydney feared that his real intention was to compete against them in Sydney. Even type that was old and worthless was difficult for Strode to buy. He had to boil it in soda to make it fit for use.

Strode, his wife and two children, along with Arden and a press and other plant, arrived in Melbourne on October 12, 1838. Surmounting enormous production difficulties, printer Strode produced the first issue of the Port Phillip Gazette on October 27, 1838. Its motto was: “To assist the enquiring, to animate the struggling, and to sympathise with all.”

Editor Arden, “the cadet of an ancient family”, was initially preoccupied with the question of gentility but from 1839, he began to quarrel with many of the gentlemen colonists and to attack them in the Gazette. Judge Willis, a financial backer of Fawkner’s Port Phillip Patriot, established on February 6, 1839, became a particular and unwise target, and Arden was jailed in 1842 for libelling him.

Aggravating the Arden problem was the friction between those Melbournians who had previously lived in Sydney and those from Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania). Fawkner had been a Van Demonian, and Strode had been a Sydneysider. In his unpublished memoirs, Strode provided details of Fawkner’s sour and embittered nature. Even as late as 1868, Strode’s dislike of Fawkner was intense and he accused him of attempting to destroy the Gazette.

One incident: Newspaper proprietors were so desperate to obtain printers that they regularly boarded the emigrant vessels in Port Phillip Bay to try to engage the printer passengers. Strode succeeded one day in getting a man, who had agreed on the wages offered, but the man did not arrive at the Gazette. Fawkner, too, had visited the ship, interviewed the printer, and offered him higher wages, and so secured his services for the Patriot. The memory of this “sharp practice” rankled in Strode’s mind long after Fawkner’s death, noted printing historian T.L. Work.

The tensions between Arden and the Melbourne community – and even Arden and Strode – built up in 1840, and Strode was registered as the proprietor of the Gazette in January 1841. The partnership between Strode and Arden was dissolved in July 1841, with Arden becoming the proprietor for three months until his brother Alfred was registered as the owner.

George Arden resumed the proprietorship on December 10, the day before Strode launched the first provincial newspaper in NSW: the Hunter River Gazette and Journal of Agriculture, Commerce, Politics and News at Maitland. Arden was jailed for 12 months in February 1842, and there were chaotic changes in who was registered as proprietor over the next few months.

In Maitland, Strode tried in vain from mid-April to sell the Hunter River Gazette. He closed it on June 25 and headed for Melbourne to oversee his continuing interest in the Port Phillip Gazette.

Arden was declared bankrupt in late 1842 and the Colonial Bank seized the PP Gazette’s copyright, plant and types. Strode was registered as the proprietor of the paper in March 1843, but lost control ten months later, although he continued to print it until September 1844. The following month he launched the Port Phillip Gazetteer which incorporated the Standard from February 1845. The Standard & Gazetteer ceased publication on September 27, 1845.

Strode’s links with NSW Governor Gipps, appear to have been maintained. When Sir George and Lady Gipps left Sydney for England on the Palestine in July 1846 at the end of the Gipps governorship, Thomas and Mary Strode were listed as among the passengers.

On his return to Australia, probably in late 1847, Strode appears to have soon obtained work in Adelaide. The family moved there in February 1848. Three months later, Strode was one of the 57 petitioners who sought a “Corporation for Adelaide”. He was working for the South Australian and was also listed as the printer when the Mercury and South Australian Chronicle began publication in March 1849. It was the first SA newspaper to make widespread use of woodcut illustrations in articles, cartoons and advertisements. The Mercury ceased publication in December 1851.

Strode returned to Melbourne, probably about 1854, and probably worked at the Argus. The next time he bobbed up outside of Melbourne was in May 1859 when he was the founding printer for the Pastoral Times at Deniliquin, NSW, where he was employed on a six-month contract.

The death of Strode’s wife Mary in 1873 must have hit him hard because when he died on May 1, 1880, one obituary noted that he had been an invalid for seven years. From all accounts he had been a hard-working, no-nonsense tradesman with a keen sense of the changes taking place in the infant colonies. He was there at the birth of two newspapers in NSW, one in Victoria and one in South Australia, and helped establish the first Oddfellows’ Society in Melbourne.

He is remembered in Melbourne through a street name (Strode Street) at Richmond, leading off Punt Road where he lived, in Jasmin Cottage, for about 35 years. Richmond also has a Type Street.