David Syme: Man of the Age

Description

The Melbourne Age newspaper dominated the newspaper stage in Australia from the 1870s to the end of the colonial period. In the 1880s its circulation was far in excess of any other daily throughout all British colonial possessions and its proprietor, the driven, talented Scotsman David Syme, was acknowledged as the leader of the Australian press. For the influence that he and his newspapers exercised, he became a legend in his lifetime and for several generations after his death in 1908. Drawing on family and business records as well as newly digitised nineteenth-century newspaper archives, this biography of a powerful man of many parts seeks to go behind the legend and round out the story of the life -- primarily as press 'baron' but also as author and philosopher, financier, farmer, property developer and, not least, family man.

Elizabeth Morrison is a historian of nineteenth-century Australian print culture. The political role of the newspaper press is a major theme of her Engines of Influence (2005), a study of Victorias country newspapers in the colonial period. She has researched and written extensively about the cultural role of the nineteenth-century Australian press as publisher of new fiction through newspaper serialisation. Locating significant original novels by noted author Ada Cambridge serialised in the Melbourne Age during 1888 and 1889, she edited them for re-publication in the Colonial Texts Series (A Womans Friendship, 1988 and A Black Sheep, 2004). She has a history PhD from Monash University, where she was a lecturer in librarianship and a research fellow in Australian studies. She now lives in Canberra.

Australia's great radical newspaperman ... his personal story revealed at last. -- Michael Cannon, author of The Land Boomers