Rod Kirkpatrick: Front line in a war of words

Aug 26, 2013 at 04:39 am by Staff


The Western Champion was conceived in Cooktown, Queensland, born in Blackall and lived most of its life in Barcaldine – a conservative newspaper that took root in the same soil that nourished the Labor movement’s famous ‘Tree of Knowledge’. The newspaper survived more than 57 years and died shortly after the 1930s depression, when the proprietorial families ran out of male family members able and willing to produce the paper.

The ‘Tree of Knowledge’ – the ten-metre ghost gum under which meetings were held during the shearers’ strike of 1891 that led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party – was added to the National Heritage List in December 2005 and died six months later, poisoned by a person or persons unknown. It was removed in 2007, but a lasting memorial was opened on the spot in May 2009.

During the shearers’ strike in 1891, Western Champion editor William Campbell wrote his anti-strike editorials within a few metres of the strikers’ headquarters and in 1892 he was the conservative candidate who contested the by-election against the strike leader Tommy Ryan (and lost).

William Henry Campbell (1846-1919) was born at St Saviour’s, Jersey, Channel Islands, the sixth child of Major-General Charles Stuart Campbell, and his second wife, Elizabeth. William received his primary education at private schools in England and later at London’s Blue Coat School, a military institution. He showed great natural ability for drawing, and in later years sold pencil sketches to illustrated magazines. In July 1861, Campbell left school, two days short of his fifteenth birthday, and was then privately tutored. He may have visited New Zealand in the early 1860s to act as an interpreter during the Maori wars, in which two of his brothers fought.

By 1865, William was in Australia and was said to be working on the leading Melbourne daily, the Argus, and possibly writing and sketching for several papers in New South Wales. Henry Parkes reportedly took “a great fancy” to him and offered him as much as £1,000 a year to work on one of the Sydney papers.

Few concrete details are known of his newspaper career from 1864 until the end of 1878, except that on February 12, 1870 he took charge for at least five months of the Manning River News, Tinonee (near Taree), NSW.

In late 1878 Campbell stopped over at Cooktown on his way back from reporting on the New Guinea gold discovery for the Melbourne Argus and producing sketches for its sister publication, the Australasian Sketcher.

He visited the Lower Palmer goldfield, inland from Cooktown, became ill and nearly died. He returned to Cooktown and, while awaiting instructions from Melbourne, assisted in the Cooktown Herald office where Charles John James and Reginald Spencer Browne had been joint owners since April 1878.

Frederic Robert James, younger brother of Charles, was a printer there. One evening in a chat with Charles James, Campbell spoke “in glowing terms of the possibilities for a successful newspaper in far central Queensland, with Blackall as its headquarters”. James agreed to the scheme and his brother, Frederic was also keen to take part. Both would have known that the Cooktown Herald was in dire straits. It was forced to close in March 1879, but publication resumed in May.

Seven newspapers had already been started in three western towns in Queensland before Campbell and the James brothers discussed their plans. In colonial Australia, many newspapers were started by public subscription and so in 1879 Campbell left for Blackall to seek support for the proposed newspaper. Campbell was able to raise only £96 ($192). Eventually a Blackall stock and station agent, John Monahan, financed the newspaper, with Campbell as his partner. When it first appeared on June 21, 1879, Campbell (32), Charles James (23) and his brother Frederic (21) were independent, self-made men.

Campbell reflected a year later that they had “started under all sorts of difficulties … we incurred heavy expenditure without the sure hope of satisfactory returns, and altogether embarked upon a hazardous enterprise without any other support than that afforded by a few of the business people of Blackall, and several station holders and managers”.

As the rail link with Rockhampton approached Barcaldine in the final months of 1886, many businesses moved from Blackall to Barcaldine. Campbell and the two James brothers wasted no time in following suit, shifting there at the end of December 1886 and missing only one issue of the Champion. Blackall got another newspaper in April 1889 when the Barcoo Independent opened.

At Barcaldine, testing times came in 1891 with the shearers’ or bushmen’s strike, which was a battle with the employers over the closed-shop principle and lowered shearing rates. With the unionists refusing to sign the contracts, free labour being brought in by train, and police and volunteer militia being shipped in from the south, an explosive situation soon developed.

Of the 18 strike camps throughout Queensland, Barcaldine was the main one, with about 4,500 people said to be in the town or camped nearby. In addition, about 29 nine officers and 509 men were in the Barcaldine military camp at the end of March 1891.

Crowds milled around the office of the Western Champion, near the strike committee’s headquarters, to read the bulletins posted on a noticeboard. Words were part of the war. In the Worker, editor William Lane wrote of “a wild howl going up from the champions of ‘law and order’ for the illegal arrest of union officials and the legal suffocating of an industrial quarrel in blood”. Henry Lawson famously wrote in May 1891 of the possibility that “blood should stain the wattle”. Two months earlier John Alexander Stuart, one of the strikers eventually arrested and tried, wrote a poem from Barcaldine of the “coming dawn” showing the world “a glorious light”, and presented his view that “heroes for the cause must bleed/Before the glorious light shall come”.

The Central District Strike Committee was publishing a weekly Labour Bulletin, which was “dashingly edited” and told “straight what bushmen think on various lively topics”. The editor until late March was Tommy Ryan, strike leader and a central figure in the political developments at Barcaldine a year later.

On the other side of the verbal struggle, the Western Champion was at the forefront. Lane saw the Champion as part of what he labelled “the capitalistic organisation and its parasites – press, premiers, and pulpits”. Gaps in the Western Champion’s files mean that no issues of the paper for the first six months of 1891 are extant (although the newspaper published in its final issue in 1937 a strike flashback, extracted from its June 23, 1891 edition).

F.J. James noted in his diary: “Mr Campbell ... did not spare the unionists and became the most unpopular man in the west. Strike headquarters was only 14 feet away from the Champion machine room, and while the strike leaders were in conference in a room the press would be running off hundreds of copies castigating them. This resulted in the name Western Champion becoming anathema in every strike camp throughout the length and breadth of Australia.

Rockhampton’s Morning Bulletin noted in 1919: “In the troublous days of the nineties when the Central-West was simply seething with unrest owing to the 1891 and 1894 strikes, Mr Campbell fought the Australian Workers Union tooth and nail. His pen was vitriolic and his caustic criticism hurt.”

Campbell, who became a Member of the Queensland Legislative Council from 1906 to 1919, was the senior partner of the Champion throughout his life, and the editor until he moved to Brisbane during his parliamentary term. He died on June 17, 1919, only hours after celebrating the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the Champion.

During the 1920s the paper was generally a 20-page sixpenny weekly, cluttered with news and advertisements, and appearing on Saturday mornings. It was never a daily, as some have claimed. Descendants of the James’ brothers – Frederic died in 1926 and Charles in 1930 – kept the paper in print until February 20, 1937.

• Digitised copies of the Western Champion, 1892-1922, are accessible through Trove, a National Library of Australia website.

Sections: Columns & opinion

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