It is illuminating, and humbling, to reflect on the trials and triumphs of our little local newspaper.
To still be publishing as an independent, locally-owned small business after 140 years is remarkable by any measure.
I tip my hat to the adventurous spirit of John Richardson McWilliam and his immediate family who saw opportunity in our district and gave their best efforts to the enterprise for almost forty years.
They and their staff shaped the nature of the publication and cemented its role as a primary, trusted source of information as well as an effective avenue for promotion and professional printing, in our ever-changing community.
The baton has passed through the hands of a vast multitude of people – owners, managers, editors, journalists, print crews, paper boys, bookkeepers, sales and office staff – who have carried on as custodians of the local news across the decades.
While legal ownership may have passed to ‘outside’ interests – Gilgandra-based H.E.O. Campbell from 1932 to (we think) 1955 and Coonabarabran’s FJ McKeon & Son 1955 to 1960 – the operation and true ‘ownership’ of the Coonamble Times has remained in local hands.
For the record, when I say local, I do not mean ‘born and bred’ or even long-term resident.
A local in my book is someone who has arrived by whatever means and – whether recent or fifty-plus years ago – has embraced the town or district in which they live, however long they may remain.
In 1960 a determined group of citizens banded together to form the Coonamble Newspapers Pty Ltd company to buy and bring the newspaper back into local hands.
This awesome foursome included Bill Jier, Pat Rodgers, Bede Waterford and Jack Skuthorp.
For a time – 1968 to 1972 – the Coonamble Times even expanded to also publish The Collarenebri Gazette in support of that community.
Over more than thirty years, directors of the company came and went until three final successors – Janelle Whitehead, Tom Cullen and Russell Smith – hit the headwinds of the 1980s and 90s and determined it was time to sell.
During that period a great many country mastheads across NSW were being absorbed into the operations of two or three big companies.
It was the Coonamble Newspapers directors’ bloody-minded determination to retain local control despite significant financial pressure and (reportedly) underhand tactics by at least one of the would-be corporate buyers, that allowed the Coonamble Times to continue as an independent publication.
In 1995/96 they recruited new owners with similar values and a commitment to authentic, high quality local news reporting in John and Julie Proud, relocated from Western Australia to live in Coonamble for ten years.
The Prouds in turn passed the mantle onto John’s son and his wife, Michael and Coleen Graham, who injected colour into the newspaper’s pages and joined the fray for a further decade.
At the beginning of 2017, in a fit of potentially misguided naivety, I purchased the publication and started to scale the learning cliff of running a local news service.
With the help of a regularly-replenished crew of clever and passionate home-grown and imported ‘locals’ we have tackled the latest in the newspaper’s technology challenges and now publish a print and an online digital edition each week on our own website and use social media to help lead people to our news.
It does help a little to know that previous custodians were confronted with the equally testing technologies of wireless (radio), television, the transition from hot metal to offset to digital printing, the replacement of linotype by electric typewriters and then computers, the advent of the internet and emails.
The tools of trade may be different but the focus remains the same – delivering real local news.
Our essential partners in this ongoing endeavour continue to be the businesses and groups who pay to advertise, the volunteers who contribute their talents through words and pictures, and the present and past residents who buy and read the paper.
Make no mistake, we might work here at this moment in time but the Coonamble Times is sustained by you.
On behalf of all our predecessors over the past 140 years, congratulations and a huge thank you to all of you who like your news local!