Samuel Wood Brooks was educated in village schools and at the People’s College in Nottingham. He worked at the college as an assistant master and later studied at a Wesleyan theological college. Arriving Sydney in 1863, Brooks became the first Wesleyan minister at North Sydney. He then took up a position at a Wesleyan mission in Fiji but was forced to leave ‘when his relations with a neighbouring planter’s wife were discovered’.
In 1880, Brooks became a partner with Brentnall Bros & Brooks and ‘became immediately involved in literary and educational movements and charitable organizations, and soon began a busy career as journalist and lecturer’. Brooks was among those who helped establish a number of educational and literary organisations including a technical college at the Brisbane School of Arts, the Brisbane Literary Circle, and a university for Queensland.
Reginald Spencer Browne, in A Journalist's Memories (Brisbane, 1927), 'claimed that Brooks began his literary career on the Observer during his editorship, and described him as a fine speaker with great breadth of mind. From 1883 under the pseudonym, "Veisoniwai", Brooks reviewed acquisitions to the School of Arts library; he covered only serious works, refusing to pander to the taste for novels. He was on the staff of the Telegraph for some twenty years and contributed regularly to the Brisbane Courier on such subjects as social justice, welfare, politics, religion, morality and literature. In 1893 he launched the Spectator, an anti-socialist weekly which seems to have soon collapsed. In 1895 he became part-proprietor of the weekly, Moreton Mail, and sole proprietor in 1896. He continued to contribute to the Telegraph and Figaro, and for a time was president of the Queensland Country Press Association.’
Source: Pamela Bray. 'Brooks, Samuel Wood (1840–1915).' Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University
Sighted: 02/10/2013
