'In the mid-1960s pioneering media scholar Henry Mayer famously complained that Australian historians had shown little interest in the press. So, while primarily a political scientist, Mayer felt compelled to do his own historical spadework to document Australian press history. The result was his ground-breaking The Press in Australia (1964) which remains to this day a much-consulted classic of Australian media studies. Since then there have been numerous scholarly works on aspects of press history – works on individual newspapers and press proprietors, state-based histories, histories of the country press, a history of the Australian Journalists Association, and volumes on the press and politics amongst them. There has, however, been nothing quite so ambitious and wide-ranging as the volume under review, which covers nearly 140 years of corporate and political press history across all Australian states. It begins with the establishment, in 1803, of Australia's first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, and ends (somewhat arbitrarily) with an analysis of the role of the press in forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Menzies during World War II.' (Introduction)
