The Melbourne Leader first appeared on 5 January 1856 as a weekly companion to the daily newspaper, the Melbourne Age. In competition with the Argus's weekly, the Australasian, the Melbourne Leader catered to a less sophisticated audience. In 1862 the title was changed to the Leader, a name familiar to many Melbourne readers for the next century.
The Age
1854
Melbourne
:
Francis Cooke
,
1854-1856
Z824768
1854
newspaper
(7346 issues)
Originally promoted in a prospectus dated 8 September 1854 by the Cooke brothers operating under the business name of Messrs. Francis Cooke and Co., General Merchants and Stock Owners, the Age was forty-eight hours from closure before the end of the year. This was avoided by compositors and other staff and supporters banding together to form a co-operative. This arrangement continued until 6 June 1856 when the chief editor Ebenezer Syme bought the paper at auction and became its sole proprietor. (In his biography of David Syme, Ambrose Pratt suggests that the Age was saved from an even earlier closure by its sympathetic coverage of the events at the Eureka Stockade.)
At Ebenezer Syme's death, his brother David Syme took control of the newspaper until his own death in 1908. David Syme left the Age to his wife and sons in trust.
The Leader
Matthew Macfie
(editor),
George Alexander Syme
(editor),
1862
Melbourne
:
E. and D. Syme
,
1862-1881
Z1033374
1862
periodical
(766 issues)
The Leader continued the Melbourne Leader (1856-1862). In its early years, the Leader published some critical essays, but offered no book reviews or literary gossip. It is well-known, however, for the journalistic contributions of Marcus Clarke and other writers such as Henry Britton, Charles Pearson and James Smith. By 1895, the subtitle of the Leader had expanded to read, 'Weekly Journal of News, Politics, Agriculture, Sport, Mining, Science and Literature', indicating the variety of content offered to readers in three to four dozen pages.
Less than ten percent of the Leader was devoted to fiction and most of that was imported from English shilling monthlies. Foreign writers whose work appeared in the first fifty years include Charles Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton, M. E. Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Walter Besant, Thomas Hardy, H. Rider Haggard, Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Very few colonial writers contributed fiction before 1900. Those that did included Mary Gaunt, David Falk, Ellerton Gay and Rosa Campbell Praed whose Miss Jacobsen's Chance (1886) was one of the few Australian serials that also appeared in book form.
While the literary content of the Leader has received scholarly attention with Toni Johnson-Woods' Index to Serials in Australian Periodicals and Newspapers, little research has been conducted on the last fifty years of weekly newspaper's history. In the early twentieth century many Australian writers looked to its pages for reviews of their work and advertising, but its literary reputation remained consistent. In 1923 John Shaw Neilson wrote to A. G. Stephens, 'The Leader was always very grubby but most weeklies are grubby. They have to be'. Despite Neilson's description, the literary pages of the Leader played a significant part in the development of Australia's literary culture.
