15 July 2009

When Canberra had two daily papers

| johnboy
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Inside.org.au have a lengthy and intriguing piece on the birth of The Australian in July 1964 when it was being published from Canberra and produced a genuine Canberra edition in competition with the Canberra Times. Ken Inglis’ 1964 vintage review of the paper has a weird love for the writing of Alistair Cooke, but also contains gems like this:

    On the first day, the space occupied in the national edition by the headline “FBI finds second headless body” was replaced for Canberra by “Eggs dropped on shoppers.” “Trapped” skiers became “Canberra” skiers. Less intelligibly, a “call girl raid” in Milan was replaced by the murder of a girl in London. Canberra readers, but not others, were told on the first day why the paper is published in the national capital. Several advertisements for Canberra firms have been appearing (wastefully, and I presume temporarily) in the national edition.

For the local history and/or media buffs it’s an excellent little window into the past.

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Canberra also had an afternoon tabloid, the Canberra News, which was published during the early seventies. It went out of print following public outrage at the publication of a photo of a suicide victim hanging from a tree on (I think) Drake Brockman Drive in Higgins/Holt.

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