That as a former typesetter, he took the fledgling Byron Echo to Macs and desktop, “beating Fairfax to it by a matter of months”, may be among the least of the claims of co-founder David Lovejoy, who died on October 2, aged 80.

Hopefully the Echo itself, launched into print in 1986, and ten years later among the first newspapers in Australia to have a website, will remain as his memorial.

The community masthead he launched with fellow Brit, Nicholas Shand has built quite a reputation, and quite a following in the Australian alternative community on which the sun shines first each morning.

Lovejoy had been running a small typesetting and commercial art company in Brisbane, before moving to Wilsons Creek in 1985, and then meeting Shand, who was looking for someone to manage production for (and set) the paper he was launching, apparently because no-one else would report the “blatant civil rights abuses” of police searching for marijuana crops.

An obituary this week says the Echo’s beginnings “were made possible by the financial support of Nicholas’s wife Jane, and the tireless contributions of committed staff”.

The author and avid chess player died of recurring throat cancer, an ailment he dubbed ‘Donald’, vowing most recently that he would live to 80, and to see Donald Trump a convicted felon, both of which goals he achieved.

Earlier, there had been the years in swinging Oxford university on an arts scholarship – “not taken all that seriously” – booze, fast cars and the discovery of LSD, described in his autobiography as “the gateway to the long voyage of self-discovery, propelled by meditation and eastern mysticism”.

A meeting with Bob Hawke followed, and more importantly (in an ashram in Sydney) another with artist, musician and life-partner-in-waiting Wendy Avery, with whom he had two children, Hans and Claire. He is also survived by three grandchildren, Emily, Sunny and Ivy

A mass of contributors have added to the Echo since the first 3000 black-only copies of the (then) Brunswick Valley Echo, with its “unflinching political reporting” and libertarian views, with Lovejoy claiming reponsibility for more litigation than Shand (who died in a car accident in 1996), “partly because he was wiser; partly because I was more pugnacious and less diplomatic”.

A Lismore edition was launched in 1991, and sold to staff “after discovering Lismore is not Byron”.

I had met David on a couple of occasions, calling in on the office in Mullumbimby en route south to check out the latest publishing innovation, and having spent a while talking on the most recent of these, can vouch that the news industry – and the world – will be the poorer for his loss.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Stephen Axelsen’s ‘The Gold Watch’, top, and David Lovejoy on his eightieth birthday, with thanks to the Echo