Thomas Strode and the ill-fated Hunter River Gazette
Thomas Strode (1812-80) is barely known to Maitland today, but briefly he played a significant part in the life of the community having founded the Hunter River Gazette and Journal of Agriculture, Commerce, Politics and News - the first newspaper to be published in the Hunter Valley. The paper’s lengthy title gives a clue as to the problems associated with establishing a newspaper in the early years of the colony of New South Wales: it had to appeal to as wide a range of interests and communities as possible. Not that the title helped much in that regard in the case of the Gazette, because the paper went out of existence in less than seven months.
Strode’s publications
Strode arrived in Australia from England in 1836. He became the mechanical superintendent for the Sydney Herald but, more importantly, in 1838 he co-founded with George Arden the Port Phillip Gazette in Melbourne. This was the first newspaper to be registered in what was to become Victoria. Melbourne was then a very small town, having been settled by Europeans only three years earlier. Strode at the time of the founding of this paper was only 26.
Strode later founded the Pastoral Times, which was published in Deniliquin, and the Hunter River Gazette at Maitland. The first issue of the Gazette appeared on 11 December 1841. Maitland at the time had a population of less than 3000.
In Maitland Strode appears to have operated as something of a one-man band. He was trained as a printer, but he learned the art of journalism and performed most if not all the functions involved in producing a newspaper. These included selling advertisements, building up subscriptions, producing the copy (including editorials and items of news) and distributing the finished product. His paper was produced on a small hand-operated press.
Doing so much of the work himself suggests that it was hard in a small town like Maitland to find the wide range of skills required to produce a newspaper. Strode had to develop them himself. A few other small towns in NSW until quite recently were operated effectively by individuals doing virtually all the work: one such case was the weekly Coonamble Times which was produced almost entirely by one person.
In his editorials Strode revealed a strong moralistic streak. He railed against the evils of temptation and argued for the need to protect the underdog, and he took it as his role to educate the members of the local community about matters he deemed important. He also had the self-confidence to use his papers as an instrument to attack his adversaries.
He expressed his views firmly and uncompromisingly on all topics, for example on the behaviour of ‘the Blacks’. In the Hunter River Gazette he called them ‘wretches’, said they were ‘prone to wild disorder and indecencies’ and indulged in ‘their usual career of drunken gaiety and savage quarrelling’. Such a hostile tone was frequently apparent in newspapers when Aborigines were discussed: Strode was thoroughly in keeping with the sentiment of white people in Australia. The Sydney Herald, for example, regularly expressed similar views, and atrocities like massacres were as a result largely glossed over.
‘The Blacks’, Hunter River Gazette, 22 January 1842
The end of the Hunter River Gazette
Probably the breadth of Strode’s responsibilities caused the failure of his Maitland initiative in mid-1842. When the Port Phillip Gazette began to experience difficulties, he returned to Melbourne to rescue it. In all likelihood he had insufficient help in Maitland to allow the Hunter paper to carry on without him. He was running a newspaper without sufficient assistance . The paper’s last issue was its 28th.
Strode appears to have been highly motivated and he must have been very hard-working to have been able to run a far-flung ‘stable’ of newspapers in various centres. His energies extended to his being a member of Melbourne’s first Masonic lodge, and he was involved also in establishing another fraternal organisation - the famous Independent Order of Oddfellows.
After his time in Maitland had come to an end, Thomas Strode lived out his career and his life in Melbourne and died in that city at the age of 68. Within a year of the closure of the Hunter River Gazette, the Maitland Mercury had made its appearance. That paper has lasted almost 183 years.
T F Chuck (photographer), Thomas Strode, 1872
References
Hunter River Gazette
Keys, Chas, ‘Our past: Maitland’s first paper was a one-man affair’, Maitland Mercury, 7 April 2023.
