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Week 18: Imagined Communities in the Antipodes

Seminar Questions

  • What different kinds of articles appear in the Sydney Gazette?
  • How did Australia’s origins as a convict colony influence the development of the press?
  • To what extent was there a regime of press censorship in colonial New South Wales?
  • Compare and contrast the development of the press in India, South Africa and Australia.

Seminar Readings

** Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 5 March 1803

** Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 1 July 1824

** Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 8 February 1826

** Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 14 February 1827

(There is one file containing all four editions of the newspaper.)

* Goff, Victoria, ‘Convicts and Clerics: Their Roles in the Infancy of the Press in Sydney, 1803–1840’, Media History, 4 (1998)

* Morrison, Ian, ‘Australia’, in Suarez, Michael and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), The Book: A Global History (Oxford University Press, 2013)

Additional Readings

Primary

A whole range of digitised collections of print from colonial Australia can be found online via the National Library of Australia’s Trove website. Important colonial newspapers include:

The Australian (1824–1848)

The Hobart Town Courier (1827–1859)

The Hobart’s Town Gazette (1816–1882)

The Monitor (1826–1841)

The Sydney Herald (1831–)

Secondary

Beals, Melodee, ‘The Role of the Sydney Gazette in the creation of Australia in the Scottish Public Sphere’, in Feely, Catherine, and John Hinks (eds), Historical Networks in the Book Trade (Abingdon, 2016)

Cryle, Denis, Disreputable Profession: Journalists and Journalism in Colonial Australia (Rockhampton, 1997)

Foyster, Elizabeth, ‘Introduction: Newspaper Reporting of Crime and Justice’, Continuity and Change, 22 (2007)

Franks, Rachel, ‘Before Alternative Voices: The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser’, Media Culture Journal, 20 (2017)

Hirst, John, Convict Society and Its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (London, 1983)

Hughes, Robert, The Fatal Shore (London, 2010)

Johnston, Anna, The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture and Power in Colonial New South Wales (Crawley, 2011)

Kirkpatrick, Rod, ‘The Provincial Press and Politics: NSW, 1841-1930’, Australian Studies in Journalism, 8 (1999)

Macintyre, Stuart, A Concise History of Australia (Cambridge, 2015)

Piesse, Jude, British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832-1877 (Oxford, 2015)

Potter, Simon James, News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (Oxford, 2013)

Veracini, Lorenzo, ‘“Settler Colonialism”: Career of a Concept’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 41 (2013)

Walker, Robin Berwick, Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803-1920 (Sydney, 1981)

Seminar Powerpoint

Powerpoint - Week 18

Seminar Handout

Handout - Week 18

Australian Newspapers

Additional Newspapers We Examined in Class