Journalism in Australia - History

History

Most of the published material in the first twenty years of the New South Wales colony was to inform residents of the rules and laws of the time. These were printed with a portable wooden and iron printing press. Since half of the convicts of the time were not able to read, it was compulsory for these notices to be read at Sunday church services.

On 22 November 1800, George Howe arrived in Australia. Nicknamed "Happy", Howe was born in the West Indies, although his father had been a native of Ireland. In London, Howe had worked in the print industry for several newspapers including The Times, but was sent to New South Wales after being charged with shoplifting, a crime which was also punishable by hanging.

In 1803, Howe started production on Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette. While much of its content was government notices, there was also an abundance of news to report in the burgeoning colony. An extract from the paper about the first Koala to be captured told of the "graveness of the visage", which "would seem to indicate a more than ordinary portion of animal sagacity".

One news gathering technique that Howe used for local content was to place a slip box outside of the store where the Gazette was published, to let the public suggest stories. Because of the country's geographic isolation, international news arriving via arriving ships was usually printed 10 to 14 weeks out of date.

The Sydney Gazette was the only paper published until 1824, when William Wentworth began publishing the colony's first privately owned newspaper, The Australian (no connection with the current paper of the same name, which was established by Rupert Murdoch in 1964).

The Australian Journalist's Association (AJA) was formed in 1910 and registered federally in 1911. In 1921, the University of Queensland became the first Australian institution to offer a diploma of journalism. The AJA was amalgamated in 1992 into the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

In 1956, Ampol Petroleum founder Sir William Gaston Walkley established Australia's most prestigious Journalism Awards, the Walkleys.

On 16 October 1975, five Australian journalists, now known as the Balibo Five, reporting on the invasion of East Timor (then Portuguese Timor) by Indonesia were murdered at a house in Balibo. The journalists, from both the Nine Network and the Seven Network, were killed by Indonesian soldiers after recording footage which proved Indonesia was behind the conflict, as opposed to the claim it was an internal Timorese coup.

Paul Moran, an ABC cameraman from Adelaide became the first Australian journalist to die while covering the Iraq war in March 2003. He was killed while working when a car bomb near him exploded. The ABC foreign correspondent working with Moran, Eric Campbell, survived the explosion and went on to write about the incident in his book Absurdistan.