The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.
The writer for the Sydney Monitor (almost certainly Edward Smith Hall) comments on the libel case being brought by Edward O'Shaughnessy against the Rev'd John Dunmore Lang. While agreeing with Lang that 'no person 'who has been transported for a felony, but who subsequently obtained his freedom, is a fit person to have the management of the Press in a convict colony', Hall disapproves of the language Lang used against O'Shaughnessy, stating: 'But the way in which Dr. Lang has represented the affair, has been slanderous and malicious in the extreme, and we sincerely hope such a flagrant breach of the laws of libel will be fairly tried, and that in the administration of public justice, the law will prove itself to be blind, and not appear to make an offence the less, because committed by a clergyman. We should not have felt justified in making these remarks, but for the above paragraph [the Monitor has quoted from the Colonist] of Dr. Lang's newspaper. But we shall not allow the Dr. to influence the coming trial by his criticisms, without correcting his articles on the subject, from time to time, as they may be published.'
The Sydney Monitor is 'sorry to observe the Australian continuing a flippant mode of expression neither friendly to his contemporaries who have not offended him, nor creditable to himself as a young man, an inexperienced editor, and a young Colonist'.
The Monitor contrasts the editorial styles of the Colonist (or the 'Cunning-ist' as it calls it) and the Australian: 'The Australian, in one respect, is inferior to the Cunning-ist. Double-face can reason; the Australian cannot. When the Australian finds an argument which contradicts its prejudices, feeling its inability to reason, it gets rid of it by saying, "we treat it with all the contempt it deserves".'
