Cirrus@Austlit

Samuel Bennett, newspaper proprietor, historian and journalist, was the son of the Reverend Christopher Bennett and his wife Anne. He migrated to New South Wales in 1841 and became head of the printing department at the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1859 he resigned and, with William Hanson (q.v.), revived the then defunct Empire. During the 1860s, parts of Bennett's History of Australian Discovery and Colonization appeared weekly in the Empire. Business pressures left him unable to finish this work and, in 1867, he published it in incomplete form. In that year he also began Sydney's first evening paper, the Evening News. In 1870 he added the weekly Australian Town and Country Journal to his stable. Financial issues forced the amalgamation of the Empire and the Evening News in 1875.

Bennett was also for a time something of a benefactor to Henry Kendall (q.v), and it was probably due to Bennett, that Kendall's early poems featured so prominently in the Empire during the early 1860s. During the mid-1860s, Bennett's daughter Rose was briefly romantically involved with Kendall.