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Search and Rescue: The Australian Newspaper Plan

The Australian Newspaper Plan aims to collect one of every Australian newspaper printed

Libraries across the nation are embarking on an ambitious plan to help save an important part of our social history—newspapers.

Under the Australian Newspaper Plan, libraries from Canberra to Hobart have compiled a list of the ‘most wanted’ newspapers—some from 100 years ago and others from less than a decade ago—that have gone missing.

Our aim is to find, collect, preserve and provide access to every newspaper published in Australia.

It’s a huge task but a worthwhile one; one that has been envisaged since the early 1990s. The aim then, as now, was for at least one hard copy of every Australian newspaper to be collected by a state, territory or national library and be preserved for permanent access.

The list of missing newspapers is about as diverse as the nation they represent: the Palmer Chronicle, for example, which was published at Maytown on the Palmer River goldfield in Far North Queensland in the 1870s. The town itself, like the newspaper, has all but disappeared.

But there are already some good news stories. It was thought no copies of the first editions (1908–1911) of the Blyth Agriculturist from the mid-north of South Australia

existed, until a brittle bundle of them was discovered in the offices of the Northern Argus newspaper in 2006. Recognising their importance, the Clare Regional History Group donated them to the State Library of South Australia for preservation.

Such newspapers not only tell stories of their times, they are also key indicators of our social, political and cultural history. The society they represented may no longer exist, but they allow us, today, to be voyeurs of those times because they reported what was of interest to their communities.

We invite everyone to take part in this ‘Search and Rescue’ mission to find the nation’s missing newspapers. Libraries across the country have compiled their lists of the ‘most wanted’ newspapers and have invited their readers to help with the hunt.

Some of Australia’s most wanted newspapers include: The Cairns Advocate (1897–1882), the Canberra Post (November–December 1968); the Swan Express (1916); and the Renmark Pioneer (1893–1895).

So if you have a pile of old newspapers gathering dust in your shed or under the bed, we want to hear from you.

For more information, go to www.nla.gov.au/anplan.

Cathy Pilgrim
Director, Australian Newspaper Plan