Oh! advance, advance New England
To thy place of hope and pride,
Resist the scorn of Sydney’s sneers,
As rocks resist the tide…
Discord and discontent prevail,
Neglect has sown the seed,
Your wants o’erlooked, demands ignored,
By Sydney’s hungry greed
Glen Innes Examiner
The many newspapers established across Northern NSW over the second half of the nineteenth century were a disparate lot.
The relative cheapness of printing technology a weekly newspaper could be started for somewhere between £300 and £600, encouraged multiple newspapers in even small centres.
In political terms, the papers broadly supported either the liberal or conservative political causes. Many, such as the Armidale Telegraph, were established or sponsored by political figures seeking to advance their interests or to advance particular causes, including the establishment of a new colony in Northern New South Wales.
Then, as now, those in power were prone to channel Government advertising to the papers that supported them.
Remains: Dorrigo railway. Fights between towns and their newspapers prevented the construction of east-west railways. When construction of a line between Guyra and Dorrigo finally began, it was halted by the Depression.
This made them intensely parochial, supporting their town against others in the fight for better facilities and transport, something that bedeviled attempts to gain things such as east west rail links. The Clarence fought the Richmond to the point that neither could win.
As the drift to the city became clearer, the papers began to articulate common themes, the idea of an oppressed country, and oppressing city, themes that would lay the basis for the emergence of the Country Party and a powerful new state movement.
One of the least recognized things in this process is the role played by town mercantile and professional interests, key advertisers in the local press.
The growth of towns and villages across the North had seen the accumulation of wealth among groups such as storekeepers that was then reinvested in building and in town and village real estate with the hope of future profit. The results of this process survive today in our built landscape.
As it became clear that the hopes of town development could not be realized, the town elites began to look for new development options, feeding into the changing views being expressed by the papers.
Note to readers: This post was prepared as a column for the on-line edition of the Armidale Express. I am repeating the columns here with a lag because they are not all on line outside subscription. You can see all the Belshaw World and History Revisited/History Matters columns by clicking here for 2009, here for 2010, here for 2011, here for 2012, here for 2013, here for 2014, here for 2015, here for 2016, here 2017, here 2018, here 2019, here 2020
2 comments:
All very true Jim and reminiscent of the role the town has played versus the rural interest since time began. It was the unstoppable growth of the town that eventually broke down the Feudal interest and brought change again with the rise of Manufacture. Sad to say that Dorrigo’s greatest tourist attraction has never opened its serried ranks of engines and rolling stock to public admiration.. The Glenreaugh to Dorrigo railway still exists in ghostly form, what a boost to local economies if some of our mineral wealth was used to re-open the line. Even more so to complete that earlier ambition to reach Armidale Then the dream fades and reality returns.
Laughs. True. I suspect that in broad benefit/cost terms the Dorrigo railway itself might pay. At the very least, it would be a major tourist attraction. But there seems no taste for it even locally.
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