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| ISBN-13: | 9781742244471 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 672 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
THE FIRST DAYS OF THE AUSTRALIAN 'FOURTH ESTATE'
CONVICTS AND BANKERS
The owners of Australia's first newspapers were a motley group of convicts, bankers, lawyers and politicians. Newspapers later told a romantic story about how these early publishers, their predecessors, had struggled valiantly to achieve press freedom in the 1820s–30s. But the development of Australian newspapers was neither as straightforward nor as glorious as the press history told by newspapers would have us believe. Partly, the problem was one of appropriation. In the early 1900s, when Australian newspapers were forging a creation story about their origins, they were greatly inspired by the already well-known history of the British press breaking free from state control in the mid-19th century. Since the Victorian era, newspapers around the world had been reciting the rousing story of brave British newspaper publishers forging a democratically essential role for an independent press. It was a touchstone for Australian newspapers then, and is still a major influence upon how they view themselves today.
The celebrated version of British press history that made such an impact on Australian newspapers goes like this ... In the early to mid-1800s, British authorities ruthlessly imposed onerous taxes on newspapers as a way of controlling information and repressing political dissent. Newspapers had to pay for a stamp that indicated their legality, plus a tax on each advertisement in the paper, and a duty on paper. As a result, newspaper prices had to be set so high that ordinary people could not afford to buy them. In the 'war of the unstamped' from 1830, many brave British newspaper owners flouted the law, refused to pay the taxes, published their papers illegally, and sold them cheaply to a working-class audience. Almost 800 publishers and vendors of illegal, unstamped papers were imprisoned in England between 1830 and 1836. As a result of their resistance, and popular support for their cause, the 'taxes on knowledge' were gradually repealed, signalling a victory for a free press by the mid-1850s.
This conventional version of British press history has been masterfully critiqued by media historian James Curran and others who have pointed out that those flouting the law were part of a radical working-class press that had arisen from the 1810s. These cheap, working-class papers had shown little concern for commercial considerations. They were instead designed to educate and rouse the working classes and, in the 1830s, to secure universal suffrage, and the repeal of the hated stamp duty taxes on the press. Because these unstamped 'pauper press' newspapers were outselling the 'respectable' press, and helping to energise the working-class movement, they came to be seen as a threat to the social order and the state. Parliamentary opponents realised that the best way to stop the pauper press was to give them what they wanted.
Abolishing the stamp duty and other press taxes made a new type of cheap press possible. All newspapers became dependent upon advertising, which was a problem for the left press. The capital costs of publishing also increased, and the climate of opinion changed. Commercially oriented publishers flooded the market with a raft of cheap, capitalist owned newspapers. Confronted by falling sales, the unstamped radical press began to make their papers 'less austerely political', more 'cheerful', and to include miscellany and general, non-political, features.
The British reformers had both hoped and anticipated that this would happen – that anti-authority outlets would become less radical and depoliticised once a larger scale, mass production, cheap press emerged. Even from as far away as Sydney, and as early as 1852, the conservative newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, believed this shift was taking place. It argued with approval that lowering the stamp duty from four pence to a penny in 1836 had led British newspapers of 'moderate opinions' to thrive in the sixteen years since, while 'the organs of extreme radicalism' and class feeling had declined. The Sydney Morning Herald was celebrating a little prematurely though. The key change occurred in 1855, when the last penny of the stamp duty was removed.
Curran has documented how the parliamentary reformers behind that move wanted to actively encourage 'a cheap press that was in the hands of men of ... respectability, and of capital' who would support the social order. They expected 'that cheap newspapers, owned by business people, would become a crucial weapon in the fight against trade unionism' and generally help 'secure the loyalty of the working class to the social order ...'. They also expected that journalists would be a part of this process because journalists came from what the conservative lawyer JF Stephens in 1862 called 'the comfortable part of society' and would 'err rather on the side of making too much of their interests than on that of neglecting them'.
In Australia, because newspapers have told Australian press history through the lens of the conventional British version, they have focused upon several outspoken, anti-authority Australian newspaper owners in the 1820s–30s. Oppressed by colonial governors, these brave publishers also went to gaol in defence of their right to publish. As a broad sketch, this crafts the same message of press heroism and independence as British press history, but a closer look at the details reveals a different story. From its earliest days, the Australian press was characterised by deference to authority and commercial ambition rather than radical politics.
The 'struggle' for a free press in Australia
Because Australia was established as a British penal colony in the late 18th century, the Australian press evolved under unusual circumstances, and quite abruptly, more than a century and a half after the British press had begun developing. In the unique environment of a penal settlement with only a small population of literate citizens, Australia's first publishers of 'news' were not commercial publishers, let alone politically oriented radicals – they were the governors of the early colonies who used convict labour to publish official government gazettes of printed orders and proclamations. One of those convict government printers, George Howe, applied to Governor Philip Gidley King for permission to publish Australia's first newspaper in 1803. King granted permission because he felt the newspaper would be useful to the administration.
It was useful because Howe's Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser was essentially a government mouthpiece, published under government supervision at Government House. Printed 'on a government press with government ink on government paper', the Sydney Gazette communicated government-sanctioned information to Sydney's 7000 colonists, of whom less than 1000 were free persons. This met the governor's needs, but Howe also had his own commercial aims, which he made clear by inserting the word 'Advertiser' in his paper's title. In its first edition, he called for advertisements and set out his advertising rates.
As Howe was a ticket-of-leave convict publishing under government supervision, it is not surprising that his paper was 'filled with deference to all authority'. Critics described it as 'moral to the point of priggishness, patriotic to the point of servility ...'. In the Sydney Gazette's early years especially, publishing it was not an easy way to make money. Paper, type and ink were in short supply, and Howe had to undertake other work to make ends meet. But publishing the government's messages, with accompanying commercial advertisements, eventually proved to be a profitable business, even if subscribers were notorious for not paying.
Fully emancipated in 1806, and married to a shop-owning widow in 1812, Howe became a wealthy man and invested in other commercial enterprises. In 1817, he became one of the fourteen foundation shareholders of Australia's first bank, the Bank of New South Wales (today known as Westpac). Howe acted as the bank's unofficial publicist, reporting its meetings with zeal. He gave full rein to his enthusiasm when the bank was founded by publishing a rapturous report that described it as the 'most distinguished ...' advancement in the colony, which would now 'progressively advance to perfection'.
In Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), Andrew Bent, the convict publisher of The Hobart Town Gazette, was also subject to restraint and censorship. In 1824, Bent took a step towards independence when he challenged the position of the government-appointed editor of his paper by withholding its proofs from that editor's oversight. When the autocratic Governor George Arthur took the side of his appointed editor and disputed Bent's ownership of the paper, Bent appealed to a higher authority, the more benign Governor-in-Chief of New South Wales, Governor Thomas Brisbane. Brisbane decided there were no legal grounds for censorship of the colony's newspapers. When this decision seemed to affirm press independence, two ambitious Sydney barristers, William Charles Wentworth and Robert Wardell, recognised the opportunity. Only a month later, Wentworth and Wardell (who had been editor of the London newspaper, the Statesman, before he arrived in Sydney), launched the fiercely independent Australian up against the government-sanctioned Sydney Gazette.
By this time, the number of free inhabitants had grown and so had their distaste for the subservient, officially sanctioned news of papers like the Gazette, still filled with its 'fulsome flattery of Government officials ...'. When Wentworth and Wardell launched the Australian, they did not seek permission to publish it. Recognising that there was probably no legal requirement for them to do so, Governor Brisbane allowed the paper to continue. He also seemed optimistic that there was little to fear from trying 'the experiment of full latitude of freedom of the Press'. In this environment of authority-sanctioned freedom, George Howe's son Robert, in 1824, also went through official channels and requested that all government restraint be lifted off the Sydney Gazette. Brisbane again agreed.
At this point, under Brisbane in the mid-1820s, there was more freedom of the press in Australia than in the United Kingdom. There was no registration, and no stamp or advertisement duties in Australia. Unburdened by such taxes, the Australian newspapers were able to offer advertising that was cheap, plentiful and profitable. This meant that, from their earliest days, Australian newspapers developed with a dependence on advertising that British newspapers did not have until decades later. Heavy taxation stymied the commercial development of the British press, but in Australia, the commercial aspects of newspaper publishing were allowed to develop comparatively unencumbered – to the extent that a convict newspaper publisher like Howe could become proprietor of a bank and the owner of property worth £4000 at his death (about $7 million in today's money).
The outspoken Australian was also proving profitable for Wardell and Wentworth by attracting audiences for columns of advertisements, including for cheese, locks, hats, lamps, pipes, rum and china plates. The commercial possibilities caught the eye of Edward Smith Hall, son of a British bank manager, who had been given an enormous and valuable land grant in New South Wales. Hall was Australia's first banker. He was the first secretary and cashier of the Bank of New South Wales (the bank of which George Howe was a proprietor). But the restless Hall found banking administration, land management, and then a position as Coroner in New South Wales (that his father pulled strings to obtain for him), unsatisfying. He became one of the bank's proprietors from 1818, and turned to newspaper publishing in 1826, when he began the Monitor.
While George's son, Robert Howe, remained content to publish government flattery, Hall, Wardell and Wentworth published reports and editorials that antagonised Brisbane's replacement, Governor Sir Ralph Darling. And in Van Diemen's Land, Bent was also proving an irritation to Governor Arthur. Where Brisbane had taken a laissez faire approach to freedom of the press, Darling and Arthur were less disposed to freedom of expression. Darling made several attempts to suppress newspapers through the British means of taxation, and also through licensing and registration. Higher authorities eventually thwarted these attempts, but there was a very brief period (only a fortnight) in 1827 when stamp duty taxes were applied. The Sydney newspaper owners complained vehemently, but three of the four publishers paid up, rather than take the British radical path of illegal resistance. The only publisher who did not pay the tax was Wardell who, as a skilled lawyer with high-up legal contacts, correctly believed the requirement to be legally invalid.
When Darling's Stamp Duty Act was disallowed, he turned instead to criminal libel laws to control the press. Darling's nemesis, Hall, made himself an easy target by publishing fierce criticisms that sometimes contained factual inaccuracies. Hall was prosecuted six times for libel, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for criminal libel against Darling. But Hall kept publishing, even from prison. In Tasmania, Governor Arthur was using similar tactics to 'relentlessly hound' Bent. Prosecuted for criminal libel, Bent was fined 'the ruinous sum of £500', and imprisoned. When Arthur imposed his own version of a stamp duty, and put newspapers under a licence, Bent was already in gaol but, like Hall, was still publishing. As he had no licence, Bent chose to publish only commercial advertisements – no editorials – for fourteen months in order to stay within the bounds of the law. Again, there was no attempt to publish illegally. Only once Arthur's legislation was disallowed by the home authorities in January 1829, did Bent return to publishing opinion, commentary and criticism.
Back in New South Wales, in 1830, Darling was still determined to stop Hall's continued 'libels' against him from Parramatta Gaol. Darling induced the Legislative Council to pass a new law making it mandatory for the court to impose a sentence of banishment on any person who was convicted twice for seditious libel. Again, all of the rebellious newspaper publishers acquiesced. The Australian deleted its editorials lest it fall foul of the new law and published an image of a printing press in chains and with the publisher strung up on it (Figure 1.1). Similarly intimidated, Hall left a blank space where his editorials usually went and inserted an image of a coffin. The publishers visually let their readers know they were in mourning for the death of freedom of the press, but they complied nonetheless with oppressive law lest they be banished from the colony.
The clauses relating to banishment were also disallowed, this time because parliament in England was repealing that section of its own law and the colonial Act could not be inconsistent with English law. Darling and Arthur had tried a variety of means to silence the press. While the owners of the Australian had been able to use their legal brilliance to ward off challenges, Hall, and especially Bent, had suffered the most extreme forms of government harassment of newspapers. But once the two autocratic governors were recalled – Darling in 1831 and Arthur in 1836 – the unique powers they tried to exercise do not appear to have been attempted again. After their departure, the press developed relatively unencumbered, although there continued to be examples of governments using government advertising and printing contracts to reward friends and punish enemies, and of libel suits used to tame recalcitrant publishers. Sydney especially developed an early reputation as the 'libel capital of the world'. Newspaper publishers were not just the victims of this litigious tendency, they were also contributors to it. From the 1830s, Sydney publishers who would loudly proclaim the importance of freedom of speech, simultaneously tried to silence rivals through libel actions.
The men behind Australia's struggle for a free press
Subservience to authority was not just a feature of the original papers in Sydney and Hobart. As newspaper historian Rod Kirkpatrick has explained, other early newspaper owners in Perth and Adelaide were also government employees, including Charles Macfaull who published the Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal from 1833, a paper that was also considered a 'Government mouthpiece'. Adelaide's first newspaper, the South Australian Gazette and Colonial Register, was printed initially in London in 1836, before the colony of South Australia was even proclaimed. It was then sent out on the ship that carried the first official European settlers of South Australia. Edited by the private secretary to the governor, it too was criticised for being the 'voice of government', and its editor used the paper to wage war against enemies of the governor.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Paper Emperors"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Sally Young.
Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
List of figures,
List of tables,
Acknowledgments,
Abbreviations,
Introduction,
PART ONE: THE FOUNDATIONS,
1 The first days of the Australian 'fourth estate',
2 The rise of newspapers,
3 The age of press empire building,
PART TWO: THE OWNERS,
4 Hugh Denison: Australia's first newspaper emperor,
5 'Who owns the owners of the Herald?': The kingdom of Collins House,
6 The real story of the birth of News Limited,
7 Keith Murdoch: Journalist, kingmaker, empire builder, puppet?,
8 Keith Murdoch: Newspaper owner,
9 'Never trust Sydney newspaper proprietors',
PART THREE: THE BATTLES,
10 The press, Joe Lyons and the Depression,
11 A friend in office and a falling out,
12 Capturing the airwaves: Newspapers, radio and the ABC,
13 Emperors of air,
14 Paper and cable cartels,
15 'Killing me': Menzies and the press,
16 Menzies' downfall,
Postscript,
Appendix: Biographies of key newspapers,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,