Political ReviewNet
First for Politics and International Relations Book Reviews

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Book Reviews

In writing about newspaper history for more than a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Morrison has done her great-grandfather, William Hine, of the Rupanyup Spectator, proud. Hine would have taken great pride in the intense interest his descendant has shown not only in the role that country newspapers played in what she has called "the making of Victoria" but also in the precision and clarity with which she writes. Morrison demonstrated that precision and clarity in her 1991 doctoral thesis, "The Contribution of the Country Press to the Making of Victoria" and has carried them over into Engines of Influence, the book that has arisen, fourteen years later, from the thesis.

Morrison greatly enhanced the breadth and depth of scholarship on Australian newspaper history through the research she did for her doctoral thesis and these elements flow through in the book. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between politics and the press in colonial Australia, especially when Victoria's dominant economic role for much of the second half of the nineteenth century is considered.

For example, Engines of Influence reveals the links in the newspaper network that worked to receive and share news, to distribute papers and to manufacture opinion. It examines country newspaper involvement in the construction and operation of political machinery and shows how the Victorian country press, while still itself evolving as a political institution, influenced events and shaped attitudes, as territory occupied by the British was transformed into a modern political state.

The book looks at the use by country papers of both the railway and the electric telegraph and employs case studies of press reactions to particular issues of intense and widespread concern to highlight the increasing complexity, speed of operation and effectiveness of newspaper links and networks resulting from these networks.

One of the most fascinating episodes that Morrison studies is what she calls "Black Wednesday journalism": the 1878 events surrounding the sacking of about 200 public servants and officers of the Crown because the Legislative Council had failed to pass an Appropriations Bill before going into recess at the end of December 1877. The radical protectionist, Graham Berry, was the Premier at the time. Morrison concludes from a thoroughly researched study of the episode that a newspaper is not a collection of discrete items, but a whole kaleidoscopic text. "The Black Wednesday journalism displays contextualising that had a broad historical dimension and a contemporaneous global reach made possible by the new technology. Yet, while the journalism was flamboyant, the sentiments were largely on the side of the cautious and conservative" (p. 230).

Morrison does not limit herself to "big-picture" analysis. She demonstrates an understanding of and concern for the career paths of the country editors and printers. She tells us of people such as George Wilson Hall, former manager of the Ballarat Evening Mail, who in 1873 became Secretary of the Melbourne Typographical Society and editor of its journal, before returning to the country newspaper business as owner of the Mansfield Guardian in 1878 and then the Benalla Standard in 1879. In the 1880s he would play a key part in country politics involving the country press (p. 197).

Engines of Influence is well served by the six maps that reveal the level and location of "press activity" (the development of newspapers) in the 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1870s and 1880s and the "active" press sites at December 1890. It is this attention to detail that brings a richness and a depth to this book that is lacking in much historical writing.

• Home
• Search Reviews
• About Political ReviewNet

Privacy Policy