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Extra! Extra! How the People Made theNewsSusann Liebicha

a James Cook University, TownsvillePublished online: 24 Feb 2014.

To cite this article: Susann Liebich (2014) Extra! Extra! How the People Made the News, AustralianHistorical Studies, 45:1, 151-153, DOI: 10.1080/1031461X.2014.877800

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2014.877800

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Church of England was not the establishedchurch in the colony, it was far and away themost powerful of the various Christian denomi-nations, due, in part, to the fact that it had tentimes the number of worshippers of any otherreligious group in the early stages of the colony(18). Developments in English marriage lawduring the 1830s were initially ignored in thecolony, and the adherence to the older Englishlaws favoured the Church of England. In 1841the colony’s first marriage laws established asystem for registering marriages and allowed forcivil marriages. Changes in the marriage lawscontinued during the 1840s and 1850s and weremarked by a growing acceptance of the rightsand needs of the various denominations.Hetherington provides a detailed discussion ofthese changes and developments in the first halfof her study.

The second half of this study concernsdivorce. The first divorce law was passed inWestern Australia in 1863, six years after asimilar law had been passed in England. Thepassing of this law was opposed strongly, andnot surprisingly, by the Catholic Church, whichby this time had grown significantly in size andin proportion to the settler population as awhole. This opposition, however, had no influ-ence on the law that was passed. The lawenshrined the sexual double standard by makingdivorce available to a husband whose wife hadcommitted adultery, but to a wife only if herhusband had committed adultery coupled withcruelty, desertion, bigamy, rape, sodomy orbestiality. Moreover, the process of obtaining adivorce was expensive; Hetherington estimatesthat court costs were approximately £40 andlegal fees between £20 and £30. While husbandswere liable to pay the legal costs of their wives,lawyers were reluctant to represent womenunless they thought it likely that their husbandwould be able to pay their fees. The alternativeto petitioning for divorce was to petition for ajudicial separation, which was easier to obtainbut did not allow for re-marriage. This was theoption most frequently taken by wives.

The passing of the Married Women’s Prop-erty Act in Western Australia in 1892 isevidence, argues Hetherington, that a ‘consid-erable change occurred in the community inperceptions of gender difference’ (145–6). Thiswas a copy of the English law of 1883 and wasimportant in the context of the divorce law asit made it easier for some wives to leave their

husbands, as married women now had own-ership of their property and earnings. Pre-viously wives had to apply to the Magistrate’sCourt for an order to protect their ownproperty and money, but the very limitedevidence that Hetherington was able to findsuggests that it was easy for husbands toignore these orders.

One of the common features of divorce incolonial societies that Hetherington observeswas the itinerant nature of both individualsand couples. This often meant that only onespouse was residing in Western Australia whenpetitioning for divorce. Given the attention thatshe draws to this issue it is surprising that shedoes not discuss the laws of domicile formarried women. According to English law, awife’s legal domicile was that of her husband,and this law was adopted in Western Australia,which meant that a wife could only petition fordivorce in the colony if her husband wasdomiciled there. Given the number of marriedmen who had arrived in Western Australia asconvicts without their wives, as well as thenumber of men who deserted their wives to goto Victoria during the gold rush, this wouldhave been an interesting aspect of the law toexplore further.

While some more comparisons with theother Australian colonies would have provideda useful context for a Western Australian study,this detailed monograph provides a strongfoundation for anyone considering furtherresearch in this area. As well as being of interestto historians of the family and gender, it will beof use to legal and religious historians and thoseinterested in the development of the colony ofWestern Australia more generally.

HAYLEY BROWNBirkbeck College, University of London© 2014, Hayley Brown

Extra! Extra! How the People Made the News.By David Hastings. Auckland: AucklandUniversity Press, 2013. Pp. 287. NZ$45.00 paper.

For newspapers in colonial Auckland, the key tosuccess and longevity was to know what readerswanted and be first with the news. Shippingreporters had one of the most important tasks:to get the latest news from arriving vessels

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before their competitors. In November 1868,news of the Poverty Bay massacre was brokenby an extra edition of the New Zealand Herald. Itsreporter Henry Brett, meeting the ship outsideAuckland harbour, was tossed a parcel of newsover the railings, rowed back to shore, sprintedto the Herald office, and thus ‘scored one thegreatest scoops of his career’ (2). Other reporterswere still interviewing the ship’s passengerswhen the Herald broke the story. Brett’s scoopis one of many vividly presented anecdotes inHastings’ book, detailing how news was gath-ered, conveyed, circulated and discussed innineteenth-century Auckland. In fifteen shortchapters, Hastings explores the many peopleand personalities, as well as the technology,that shaped Auckland’s newspaper scene, fromthe birth of the New Zealander—Auckland’s firstlong-lasting paper—in 1845 and its competitionwith the Southern Cross in the 1850s and 1860s,to the rivalry between the Herald and theAuckland Star throughout the 1870s to 1890s.Many short-lived papers also feature in thebook, testifying to the rich, varied, but alsovolatile newspaper market in the period.

At the heart of the book is the thornyquestion of whether papers reflect or shapepublic opinion. Hastings argues that becausenewspapers had ‘to serve readers’ interests,newspapers were shaped by their communities’.As such, they provide unique insights into the‘societies from which they emerged’ (3). Hast-ings emphasises that readers’ attitudes andinterests dictated newspaper content and cover-age, but the real insights of his book come fromdrawing the contours of Auckland papers’ posi-tion ‘at the crossroads of political, commercialand reader interests’ (247).

Hastings brings to life Auckland’s newspaperoffices with great skill through several themes:the commercial pressures of producing a suc-cessful paper; the interconnections betweenpolitics and papers; the pressures of deadlines;the high degree of movement of editors, sub-editors, printers and proprietors between differ-ent papers; and the way in which technologiesshaped newspaper content and form. Therhythms of coastal shipping, for instance, dic-tated the rhythms of reporting during theWaikato Wars, while several newspapersemployed carrier pigeons to transmit newsfrom the Thames goldfields to Auckland duringthe gold rushes; the purchase of a steam-powered press allowed the Southern Cross to

become Auckland’s first daily paper in 1862,and the introduction of cable news and thefounding of the United Press Associationresulted in a tightening of Auckland’s newspa-per market in the 1870s. Equally important,Hastings highlights that Auckland’s papers werethe product of and served local as much asimperial communities. Papers contained inter-national news based on imported newspapersand cables; and through readers in London,Auckland’s papers could influence imperial pol-icy, something of which editors and readerswere acutely aware.

New Zealand’s colonial newspapers havelong been neglected as objects of study, andHastings’ engaging narrative will be accessibleto a general audience and of interest toacademic readers for its insights into newspaperproduction in colonial society. Yet the limitedengagement with existing studies of newspa-pers in this period, in New Zealand or else-where, and especially with recent scholarlyliterature, including Tony Ballantyne’s inter-rogation of the place of newspapers withinNew Zealand’s colonial culture, is disappoint-ing. There are references to ‘other studies’ or‘some theorists’, but too often Hastings doesnot reveal who these might be, and many ofthe sources given in the endnotes appear dated.Placing the history of Auckland’s papers, atleast tentatively, within a larger context ofnineteenth-century journalism would haveadded much to the argument.

Another point of criticism concerns Hast-ings’ commendable attempt to bring readersback into the story. Despite his main argumentthat readers held the power over newspapers’successes and failures, actual readers are rela-tively absent from this book. Granted, readersare notoriously difficult to track in the histor-ical record, but scholarship in the history ofreading provides plenty of models for tracingactual readers’ responses. Hastings might havemade much more of the letters-to-the-editor,or looked for sources beyond the newspapersand the handful of journalists’ reminiscencesthat he draws on in his book. Finally, readerswill be pleased with the numerous black-and-white illustrations, including cartoons, repro-ductions of newspaper columns and photo-graphs, that accompany the text. On theinside front cover is a great photo of a groupof men reading the paper outside Auckland’sStar office. If the text mainly evokes the

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producers of Auckland’s papers, this photocaptures some of the real readers devouringthe news with great immediacy.

SUSANN LIEBICHJames Cook University, Townsville© 2014, Susann Liebich

Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: CharityBazaars in Nineteenth Century Australia.By Annette Shiell. Newcastle upon Tyne:Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. Pp. 316.£44.99 cloth.

Trivialised by many contemporaries and largelydisregarded by historians, nineteenth-centurycharity bazaars made vast amounts of moneyfor philanthropic causes, using techniques thattranscended national boundaries. As Shiell sug-gests, they also represented microcosms of life atthe time, illuminating a range of themes inAustralian social and cultural history duringthe years of their ascendancy. Looking at boththe British origin of the charity bazaar and itsadaptation to Australian circumstances, Shiellcharts, in some detail, the class, gender andeconomic implications of the charity bazaar andits ‘fancy work’ products in colonial Australia.

Shiell takes further the arguments of FrankProchaska and others that bazaars provided an‘intermediary space’ for women and a site of‘genteel performance’ between the public andprivate spheres. Bazaars attracted opprobrium fortheir apparent loosening of gender constraints,for putting women on display in ways thatcapitalised on their sexual allure, and, sometimes,for encouraging raffles and gambling. At thesame time, they financially supported manycolonial charities and churches; charitable insti-tutions such as hospitals and orphanages provid-ing a particular focus for the meticulous planningthat was required. This tension between respect-ability and transgression is engagingly exploredin the book, illustrations from contemporarypublications reinforcing the ambivalence aroundwomen’s conduct at bazaars.

A particular strength of the book is itsexamination of the relationship between thecharity bazaar, consumerism and the market-place. Shiell shows how bazaars anticipatedmany of the selling techniques of departmentstores: the display, under one roof, of a range ofitems at a fixed price from which the purchaser

could make a choice (rather than asking ashopkeeper for a predetermined article, or hag-gling over price); selling by women; and the useof supplementary attractions such as food, musicand other entertainments to attract consumersand to encourage the impulse buying of ‘luxury’(or useless) items. The commonalities were mostmarked with the large ‘grand bazaars’ of thelater nineteenth century, which were oftenopen for long periods of time and which offeredan even greater variety of experience in spe-cially designed exhibition sites.

A contribution to the history of materialculture is made most strongly in the chapter on‘fashioning the fancy work’. This surveys thechanges which occurred in response to thebazaars’ popularity, most especially the appear-ance of faster, easier and more universal formsof fancy work, some of it drawing upon com-mercial patterns. The women contributing to thearray of decorative items stitched, glued,moulded and otherwise fashioned a range ofthreads, feathers, mosses, pine cones, animalparts and even seaweed into decorative itemswhose non-utilitarian nature was in itself a signof the producer’s and the purchaser’s status. Theexpansion of fancy work was enabled by tech-nological innovations such as the home sewingmachine, which reduced the time spent in‘plain’ sewing of unembellished items for thehousehold.

Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork showsthe imprint of the doctoral thesis on which it isbased. Its many examples and a certain repeti-tion of argument would have benefited from atighter editorial hand, while an index is lacking(the chapter on ‘fancy work’ would have pro-vided some interesting challenges for anindexer, however). Shiell has nonethelessshown that charity bazaars (and their associatedcommercial and semi-commercial counterparts)need to be taken seriously by scholars of wel-fare, of business, of gender and of wider socialand cultural history. Even at the minutely locallevel the Australian bazaar was part of a broadertransnational enterprise, changing over time asthe colony itself became more complex andclosely settled. It provides fertile ground forcross-disciplinary analysis.

MARGARET TENNANTMassey University, New Zealand© 2014, Margaret Tennant

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