324 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



John Pascoe Fawkner and John Thomas Smith may be taken as 

 fair types. 



The intellectual side of Melbourne life did not blossom into book 

 production. There was a fair and growing library at the Mechanics' 

 Institute, where the leading periodicals from England could be seen 

 some four months after publication, and there were book clubs and 

 reading associations for the economic consumption of imported 

 literature. The author had not yet arrived, but his forerunner, the 

 journalist, was very much in evidence. The efforts in original 

 composition were practically limited to the articles in the daily 

 papers, which, sad to say, were but too frequently splenetic vilifica- 

 tion of the opposition journal. From the time when the Gazette 

 and the Patriot first came into collision in 1839, there had been an 

 almost incessant outflow of insulting and disparaging vituperation 

 between each of the contentious journals that came into existence. 

 Mr. Fawkner's first venture, the Melbourne Advertiser in 1838, has 

 been already referred to nine weekly issues in laborious manuscript 

 form were published, and by the time he had got command of a 

 little discarded type and a primitive form of hand-press, further 

 issues were stopped by the police magistrate, who had only then 

 discovered that taking advertisements made it a " newspaper ". As 

 such it required to be registered in Sydney, and the proprietor was 

 called upon to find two sureties of 300 each for its future credit- 

 able conduct. This Fawkner was not able to do at the time, but 

 after much negotiation with Sydney and a suspension of eight 

 months he found himself in a position to resume, and changing the 

 name of his paper to the Port Phillip Patriot he recommenced his 

 journalistic career on the 1st of January, 1839. 



But while he was grizzling over official delays, two young men 

 from Sydney, George Arden and Thomas Strode, stole a march 

 upon him, and in October, 1838, they commenced the issue of the 

 Port Phillip Gazette. The resulting feud between these papers 

 has been amusingly illustrated by extracts in Mr. Bonwick's notes 

 on the early Australian Press. Neither of these journals could be 

 ranked as high-class, and in point of management and provision of 

 news they could not stand against the superior work and greater 

 influence of the Port Phillip Herald, started by George Cavenagh 



