Socio-economic and technological advances had important consequences for fiction and journalistic practice, conventions and techniques during the half-century. Publishing was a risky business with newspapers springing up and vanishing like gold-rush towns. Original editorial content, which cost money, fought for space and attention with domestic and overseas news, which could be “cut and pasted” from other papers without payment.
At mid-century the Sydney Morning Herald’s front page was crowded with advertisements relating to shipping, tuition, a race meeting, real estate and an itemised list of merchandise from London: bottled fruits, twine and candles. A lengthy public notices section included lists of cattle and horses lost and found. Just one thing was missing: news. In fact, no Australian newspapers ran news on the front page until 1910. They existed to make money – otherwise they would not exist – and there was little notion of news values at that time.
Thus, before 1850, there was little need or funds for “staff reporters”. But lack of staff meant most Australian newspapers were open to contributors’ submissions. This is how many 19th century journalist-novelists began as paid writers, including Marcus Clarke and Catherine Helen Spence. Such original content became more valued as newspapers grew increasingly competitive and reliant on advertisers. They subsidized printing costs, keeping the cover price down and enhancing circulation. In some cases a growing economy meant writers vied for space with department stores and shipping companies. In others it meant newspapers grew in size and therefore had more space to fill.
The telegraph played a crucial role in the development of newspapers and was the world’s most important communication device from the 1840s to the 1920s (Livingston, 1996: 6). Although the telegraph boosted foreign coverage by most newspapers it also added considerably to costs without an equivalent increase in circulation. For instance in 1891 The Times of London spent 2480 pounds for 49,505 words from India correspondent Hugh MacGregor. A head-office instruction cut these costs by 25 per cent (Kaul, 1997: 76-8). This made editors more circumspect about the number and type of stories accepted via telegraph. Also, reporters were encouraged to write with greater economy and precision. According to Robertson, the
per-word charge for telegraph cables meant correspondents had to write their news reports in “extremely taut prose” (1997: 207).
In Australia most capital cities were connected by telegraph in 1861 and to Britain in 1872 (Mayer, 1968: 13, 15). During the 1880s the telegraph fed an Australian appetite for overseas news by newly arrived UK immigrants (Quinn, 1999a: 61, 63). In the process news agencies evolved as the telegraph assisted Australia’s federation and unification. The telegraph increased the editorial space devoted to overseas news. In the Age and Herald in Melbourne from 1875 to 1900 it rose, respectively, from 7.9 per cent to 23.6 per cent, and from 5.2 per cent to 29 per cent. Also, contributors could send in articles from afar. This advanced the growing and popular genre of travel journalism and bush-based sketches.
For potential journalist-novelists, it extended their geographical and thematic reach and broadened their visions and understandings of regions and cultures. Rather than writing essays and commentaries centred on what others were writing, more writers sought original material through direct observation and experience. This accords with realism’s supremacy in fiction. According to Morgan, Henry Lawson gained from the 1890s movement toward realism as the focus turned from aristocrats to ordinary people doing ordinary things (1988: 238-9). He sought objective accounts of specific events and resisted “emotional fancies”. Lawson said he: “… wrote of nothing that I had not myself seen or experienced; I wrote and re-wrote painfully, and believed that every line was true and for the right” (1969: 78). Kiernan argues Lawson’s story “The Union Buries its Dead” has a voice so authentic “we might be uncertain whether Lawson is ‘writing up’ an actual incident he had observed back of Bourke or imaginatively inventing this funeral to capture the essentials of life as he saw it” (1976: xv). To what extent this might be a sketch from life is however, beside the point. One is tempted to revive the opening extract that journalism is the best lens through which to view society. The Kiernan position that literature is about imagination rather than social documentation poses fictive and journalistic techniques as oppositions. Without defining “works of the imagination” or interrogating his stance, it may be instructive to consider what Sylvia Lawson meant by the “Archibald paradox”:
The Archibald paradox is simply the paradox of being colonial. Metropolis, the centre of language, of the dominant
culture and its judgements, lies away in the great Elsewhere; but the tasks of living, communicating, teaching, acting-out and changing the culture must be carried on not Elsewhere but Here. (Lawson, 1987: ix)
If the Kiernan “lens” is really a mirror for the imagination, his “Here” may be in Sylvia Lawson’s “great elsewhere” and beyond the tangible concerns of many readers. Whether in newspapers or fiction more writers connected with them by sharing experiences of the observed world. After 1850 novelists and journalists had begun to employ investigative techniques that drove their themes and moved their narratives. This approach was the antithesis of the Romantic Movement, which viewed writing as an act of self-expression, as if the point of writing was writing, not reading. However the ascendant social reform novel and its cousin, the convict novel, together with a growing preference for direct-observation rather than comment journalism were reader than writer-driven phenomena.
Mayer dates popular journalism in Australia from 1867 (1968: 20). It was reader friendly and targeted blue-collar workers. Crime, sport and parliamentary coverage tended to dominate late 19th century editorial content. In 1883, the Sydney
Morning Herald was described as having a “fatal odour of respectable dullness”
(Twopeny, 1883: 223). However it had an audience, as did more popular titles such as
The Currency Lad (Meyer, 1968: 21). This diversification, combined with
developments in technology and transport systems, created a foothold for national periodicals such as the Bulletin, to which potential journalist-novelists could contribute. It came to represent the nation’s strongest material link between news and novels and journalists and novelists. Both forms intended accessible and meaningful prose. As Charles Dickens said, newspapers should not act as if they were trading in patent medicines (Bromley, 1997: 13).
The social reform novel, often written by journalist-novelists and promoted through newspaper serialisation, superseded the Romantic novel. Yet it is credited with the novel’s elevation as serious literature at the expense of journalism, which had been seen as the more elite form. According to Hartsock: “The ‘fall’, then, of journalism – and by extension narrative literary journalism – from literary grace was largely the result of the invention of a high literature in the 19th century.” Journalism, he continues, was condemned as utilitarian, a victim of objectivity and scientific impulses in mass communication. Lounsberry agrees journalistic practice in the era is
being recognised as literary through narratives that examine compelling social issues of immense societal concern (1990: xi). When writers such as Clarke and Spence achieved this in newspapers and novels it makes storytelling seem more a matter of form than content.