It wasn’t just prospectors, miners and drifters that eked out a precarious living in the early years of North West Queensland, the newspapers too flourished and died with the ups and downs of the towns they served.
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Among them were the Flinders Pastoral and Mining Register, the Burke Telegraph, the Cloncurry News and Mount Isa Record and the Mining News.
The Telegraph was typical. When H.H. Grahame set up offices in Burketown on the corner of Musgrave and Burke Sts in 1896, it catered for a prosperous pastoral industry and port.
But when Burketown went into decline, so did the Telegraph and it soon went under.
A more longer lasting publication was the Cloncurry Advocate which was established in 1888.
An Englishman W. S. Wilmer, who was a commission agent and long-term secretary of Cloncurry Race Club began the newspaper in Scarr St in 1889 when Cloncurry was the centre of a rapidly expanding copper and gold field.
Wilmer sold out to Normanton man Richard Charles Hensley who edited the paper himself.
The Advocate ran into competition in 1910 when the Mining News started but that didn’t last long, selling out to Hensley two years later.
Another paper started up in Cloncurry in the 1920s.
Real estate agent and Club Hotel owner Douglas McGillivray started the Cloncurry News and Mount Isa Record from premises in Ramsay St with the unusual motto “Peace if possible but news at any rate”.
Peace was rarely possible between the two papers though the Advocate outsold its rival by almost two to one, and like the Mining News before it, the Cloncurry News sold out to the Advocate by the end of the decade.
The first edition of the the Cloncurry Advocate digitised by Trove is from January 10, 1931 and it has front page ads for the Leichhardt Hotel which was “electronically lit throughout” while mail contractor and general carter Jim Douglas announced he was doing all his work with a “new REO motor lorry” and when you wanted him all you had to do was “ring up number 91”.
As the mining field in Mount Isa gradually overshadowed Cloncurry, the Advocate encompassed the new area.
On December 11, 1937 the Advocate announced the mines at Mount Isa were “producing metal on a large scale with no sign of its production diminishing. A profit, the first since the commencement of production was announced of £70,000 odd.”
The Advocate continued to cover the Isa until it was usurped by a newcomer called the Mount Isa Mail.
On December 1, 1953 the Advocate announced this was its final edition as a separate paper.
“In future the paper will be merged with the Mount Isa Mail and will appear twice weekly on Wednesdays and Fridays serving the whole of north western Queensland,” the Advocate said.
“Friday’s paper will contain acceptances of race meetings in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne while Wednesday’s paper will carry camera shots of all race finishes in Sydney. There will be a crossword puzzle, Wally the Major, Canberra Diary, book reviews, motor notes and other features.”
The Mail was initially printed in Darwin for Northern Territory News Services and flown in to Mount Isa.
The Advocate’s press and two Linotype machines were eventually transported to the Mail’s new quarters in Gardenia St on the mine side of the Barkly Hwy.
In 1959 the paper moved to new premises on West St formerly occupied by the Community Fruit Mart.
Then owned by a brash young Rupert Murdoch it was finally usurped in 1966 by the even younger North West Star.