Newspapers and Their Readers in Early Eastern Australia: The "Sydney Gazette" and its Contemporaries, 1803-1842

The thesis examines newspaper production and readership in early Eastern Australia, extending, and sometimes challenging, current ideas about the social and economic role of the colonial bourgeoisie. It traces the dramatic changes in cultural life experienced in the shift from the authoritarian regimes of the early penal colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land to the more open, partly democratic societies of the 1830s and 1840s. Major sources are the rare surviving subscription and office books of the Sydney Gazette, covering the 1830s. These records provide a convenient sample of newspaper readership in a key decade for the commercialisation of the Australian printing and newspaper industry. The period saw the beginnings of the transition from the small family print shop to the impersonal financial and organizational structures of corporate capitalism. The shift from scarcity to abundance of printed matter was matched by dramatic changes in the social composition of reading publics, and the activity of reading itself. These changes are explored in the context of a comparable 'reading revolution' occurring elsewhere within Western capitalist societies, as discussed by Robert Darnton for eighteenth century France, and David Hall and others for colonial New England. A study of newspaper readership highlights the degree to which the Australian colonies of the early nineteenth century were a stronghold of middle class life. The new patterns of work and leisure emerging within bourgeois households were starkly apparent in the new craze of newspaper reading. Parlour and office reading, as well as reading over breakfast, signalled the modern era of casual reading.