“But wait, there’s more.” This could have been the qualification when a Rockhampton sub-editor wrote the headline for the retirement in 1991 of long-time printer, Horace Burgess Harvey: ‘Ink runs dry on four generations of news’
Harvey is a great-grandson of Robert Burgess, a pioneer newspaper proprietor and printer whose career had begun about 135 years earlier in Wollongong.Harvey himself probably thought the Burgess family’s links with newspapers were finishing in 1991, but his grand-daughter had other ideas, as will be shown next month.
Robert Burgess began as a printer’s devil on the Illawarra Mercury at little more than 10 years of age in the second half of the 1850s. He helped start the Bombala Times in the second half of 1867.
Selling out of Bombala, he bought the Bega Gazette, and ran it for a year or two before buying the Singleton Times, which had been published daily for three months at the end of 1863. He closed the Singleton paper and his associated businesses, such as retailing tobacco goods, stationery and books, in November 1871 and moved to the new railway terminus, at Murrurundi in the upper Hunter.
He started the Murrurundi Times on December 9, 1871, and did so well that the Singleton people wanted him back. He launched the Singleton Argus on July 11, 1872, and printed it at Murrurundi, but it survived only three months. (A later newspaper with the same title, started on July 15, 1874, is the Argus that has survived until now.) Burgess flew the family flag at Tenterfield (1874), Ulladaulla (also 1874) and Moruya (1878) before he took his presses to Queensland. He printed the Rockhampton Temperance Advocate in 1885 before renaming it the North Rockhampton Times.
Forever on the move, he next started papers at Bundaberg, Eidsvold and Allora. He sold the Allora Guardian – the third one of that name – in January 1889 and died three months later, aged 44, from ‘a heart disease caused by exhaustion’.
His two sons and daughter continued where he had left off. Robert Horrex Harvey launched the Eidsvold Liberal on December 10, 1897. Two years later he launched the Clermont Truth and then the Mount Perry Times about 1903.
He was later associated with newspapers at North Rockhampton and Gladstone before he moved to Bundaberg in 1921 and bought a cordial factory. His brother Alfred and sister Eveline took over from him at the Eisdsvold Liberal and later they ran the Gladstone Advocate (published 1898-1902).
The third Burgess generation involved in newspapers came through Robert Horrex’s daughter Rose who was interested in papers and married Chris Harvey in 1925. The Harveys had a son, the Horace who inspired this series of column items and his story will be told in the next History column.
Need to know more about our first printer
There is a move afoot amongst researchers in the Australian bibliographic world to chase down more information on Australia’s first printer, George Hughes, appointed in November 1795.
You may recall that on September 11, 2007, at Parliament House, Canberra, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, presented the first known playbill printed in Australia to Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. The playbill is now part of the collection of the National Library of Australia.
Hughes is said to have printed some 200 government orders between November 1795 and November 1800, yet not one copy has ever been located, says Elaine Hoag, of Library and Archives Canada.
Hoag says that an extraordinary discovery was made in June 2007, in the rare book collection at Library and Archives Canada. Preserved in a scrapbook was a playbill from Hughes’s Sydney press, dated July 30, 1796 – ‘he earliest extant Australian imprint, in a unique copy totally unknown to scholars and collectors’.
Hoag then set out to trace the provenance of this “obscure piece of ephemera” over the course of two centuries. Professor Wallace Kirsop, of Melbourne, is leading the push to dig more deeply into the life and work of George Hughes, particularly to try to uncover more of the products of Hughes’s labours.
He spoke about the matter at a newspaper-history seminar at the State Library of Victoria on May 23. The main focus was on digitisation of newspaper files, so the focus on the first printer provided a nice historical balance.
First impressions
Letters can be wonderful archival resources and some collections of letters have given rise to fascinating books (especially on war). In the days before cheap long-distance calls and mobile phones, I used to write daily letters to my wife when away on research trips.
It’s fascinating to revisit, through these letters, the reflections I shared about some of the newspapers I visited. I wrote a letter in May 1979 commenting on the office of a Queensland daily.
“It’s 21 years old, and its looks like the office of a newspaper that is down on its uppers. It’s badly in need of painting; badly in need of modernising; badly in need of brightening up and saying to the city – look, this is where your news is reported from, this is Your Newspaper.
“Lino on the floors – grey or brown. Dirty marks all over the walls. Old desks. Battered typewriters. Generally a mess. Notices stuck to walls in journos’ room; faded, on copy paper. Higgledy-piggledy. A mess.
“Walk into the front office and you think, heck, what a dull place. How could it put out a bright newspaper?”
