Following the death of her husband, the Rev. Alexander Laurie in 1854, Janet Laurie and her sons Andrew and James moved from Portland (where Alexander Laurie had founded the Portland Herald) to Mount Gambier. It was here, in 1861 that Janet Laurie founded the Border Watch, taking the paper's name from her Scottish birthplace. According the SA Memory website, the newspaper is South Australia's oldest country newspaper and the first in the state to be run by a woman.
John Watson, a friend of Adam Lindsay Gordon (q.v.), joined the paper two years after its establishment. Some of Gordon's poems, including 'The Feud' in 1864, were published in the Border Watch's pages.
'In 1932 a plant for producing photographic blocks was purchased, making the Border Watch one of the earliest country newspapers to include photographs in its pages... In 1978 printing was changed to the web offset process. Today [2012] it is South Australia's largest country newspaper with a circulation of 7,500.'
Source: SA Memory website, http://www.samemory.sa.gov.au/
Sighted: 24/01/2013
