By James Joyce
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When The North West Star was born in Mount Isa on Thursday, May 12, 1966, the newspaper proudly declared from the front page of its first edition that its editorial policy was "clear-cut and decisive".
The mission: "the welfare of the men, women and children who have accepted the challenge of the rugged outback to help build new cities and towns, develop new industries and to win for themselves their own particular place in the sun in this vast land of mineral and rural resources".
Of course, the launch of The North West Star was itself a brave bid by a band of enterprising adventurers to build something new in Queensland's rugged north-west.
Specifically, a new morning newspaper to compete directly with the Mount Isa Mail - an afternoon daily published by a young upstart of a newspaper proprietor by the name of Rupert Murdoch.
The North West Star, under the headline "A Star is born", spelled out its purpose on Page 1 of that very first edition in May 1966: "Fearlessly and without favour, The Star . . . will dedicate itself to serving the interests of all the people of this great part of Australia."
"In every issue The Star will set itself out to justify the slogan it has proudly adopted for the masthead carrying the name of the paper, 'All the News for the North-West'."
I'm proud to say that my late grandfather, Bill Moloney, as the founding managing editor of The North West Star, helped draft that defining mission statement and helped establish the newspaper you hold in your hands today.
Bill, a qualified printer who'd moved into journalism as a reporter at the Manly Daily in beachside Sydney, had ventured to Mount Isa in the early 1960s with his wife Patricia and their five (soon there would be six!) children to work for Mount Isa Mines.
At MIM Ltd (now Glencore-Xstrata) Bill had taken a job as the staff journalist producing the company's inhouse newsletter, Minews, and as associate editor of its regular gloss magazine, Mimag.
Before making that epic trek to outback Queensland with the Moloney tribe in tow, Bill had started his own weekly newspaper in north-west NSW, the Collarenebri Gazette, which he'd run as a family concern for three years.
So when MIM management grew frustrated with coverage of the Mount Isa Mail and the company's public relations consultant, Sir Asher Joel, resolved to start his own newspaper in the town, the new publishing venture had an editor ready to steer it in Bill Moloney.
The Mount Isa Mail, launched as a bi-weekly in June 1953 and initially printed on the Northern Territory News presses in Darwin and flown to Mount Isa, had been purchased - along with the NT News - by Rupert Murdoch in 1960.
By 1965, the fledgling media tycoon had made the Mail into an afternoon daily.
But its editorial line, including in its coverage of strikes at the mines, apparently irked MIM management, prompting the entrepreneurial Sir Asher to launch a local paper in competition.
The Sydney businessman and NSW Country Party MP had begun his media career as a copyboy at Sydney's Daily Telegraph in the 1920s.
In forming the publishing company Carpentaria Newspapers Pty Ltd, Sir Asher became its managing director, Bill Moloney was appointed managing editor and Roy Douglas, who'd started his career as an apprentice on the old Cloncurry Advocate, was production manager.
"Behind the publication of the first issue of The North West Star is a story of human beings," the newspaper noted as it introduced its management and staff on Page 2 of the first edition in 1966.
"Printer's ink flows freely in the veins of almost everyone associated with The North West Star."
The 24 pages of that first day's paper - my grandfather's copy of which was passed to me after his death in 2001 - is crammed with local news, sport and features, as well as state, national and world news ("Red planes attack jets with missiles," screams a headline about North Vietnamese MIGs firing on US fighter planes).
Advertisements show that the movies The 300 Spartans and Thunder Island were playing at Mount Isa's Tropicaire Drive-In that weekend. Coles was advertising flannelette shirts for $1.35 and 3-pint aluminium "whistling kettles" for 89 cents. The newspaper itself cost 5 cents. And there were two phone numbers for The North West Star offices displayed under the masthead on Page 1: 383 and 965!
This week, almost five decades after its modest debut, The Star has been reborn in The Isa.
It has a smart, fresh, modern new look and feel. Its editorial and sales teams use digital publishing technology that is at the forefront of newspaper production worldwide.
And it's now published three days a week - Tuesdays, Thursdays and, for the first time, Saturdays - as Mount Isa's local newspaper transforms just as the town and region it serves have transformed.
The North West Star has, of course, always been evolving. From its origins as a commercial and political media strategy aligned to the interests of the town's biggest employer, it eventually grew to be an independent voice for its community. And now it is changing to meet the needs of those same audiences and advertisers; to meet the challenges of providing quality local community news and information in the digital age of 24/7 Google, Facebook and Twitter; and to secure its future as a part of the glue that binds Mount Isa together.
Of course, my grandfather could never have imagined as he laboured over the printing press in Camooweal Street the night before that first edition hit the streets in May 1966 that the journalists at The Star might one day be able to produce a newspaper without typewriters and hot metal. Or that The North West Star would evolve beyond the printed page to be accessible around the world at northweststar.com.au. Or that residents of The Isa might one day be able to read breaking local news on their phones.
The internet may have changed almost every aspect of our daily lives, but some things haven't changed about The North West Star - its news is still diligently gathered by a band of energetic young journalists and the passionate locals on its sales team are still dedicated to connecting advertisers with the masthead's loyal audiences.
And The North West Star today remains true to its founding mission to report "fearlessly and without favour" as a proudly independent and proudly local champion for the community of Mount Isa and the wider north-west.
For the record, two months after the arrival of The North West Star, Rupert Murdoch folded the Mount Isa Mail and left town. The Joel family continued to operate The Star until 2006, when it sold the paper to Rural Press ahead of its merger with Fairfax Media the following year.
* James Joyce is executive editor of Fairfax Media's regional, rural and suburban publishing business, Australian Community Media. A journalist for more than 25 years, he is a former editor of The Canberra Times and a former deputy editor of the Newcastle Herald. His grandfather didn't stay at The North West Star for long after its initial success, and was soon packing up his family for more adventures in publishing down south. But Bill Moloney's copy of that launch edition of The Star remains a treasured family keepsake.