1769-1821 | NSW | Publisher
Howe was a transported convict who started Australia’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser in 1803, the year of his conditional pardon. He also published the first books in the colony. Some have compared Howe to the English printer William Caxton, and the pair are commemorated together in the State Library of NSW. Others have labelled Howe a subservient convict printer who toed the Government line.
Howe was readying himself to publish the first periodical magazine when he died on 11 May 1821. Having narrowly avoided the gallows as Happy George and arriving in the colony penniless, he left property worth £4000.
George Howe’s reputation and career veered between respectable and criminal, and then back again. It is little wonder that by the time he restored his good name after a time in the firm grip of the law he felt required to play things safe.
Howe was born on the island of St Kitts in the West Indies. His father was the government printer at Basseterre, a city on the southwestern shore surrounded by lush green hills and mountains, picturesque but with a tragic history since the time of its founding in 1627.
Howe, educated and well-read, was apprenticed to the printing trade in St Kitts, but for reasons that are not clear he left in 1790 and went to London, where he worked on the fledgling Times and other newspapers.
It is assumed he fell on hard times because in 1799 disaster struck: using the name of George Happy, alias Happy George, he was tried at the Warwick Assizes for shoplifting at Alcester, a town of Roman origin at the junction of the River Alne and River Arrow in Warwickshire. He was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation for life and he arrived in Sydney in November 1800 with his young son Robert, his wife having died on the voyage.
Following in the footsteps of his father, he became government printer, going on to enjoy a notable career. In 1802 he issued the first book printed in Australia, New South Wales General Standing Orders. On 5 March 1803 he launched the colony’s first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, which used the official St Kitts gazette as a blueprint.
Young Robert, perched on a stool, helped his father and later recorded how the printing press was ramshackle and the amount of type inadequate (once he had to use blanks in place of e’s). Ink and paper were always in short supply—he advertised for it again and again—while more problems arose because many subscribers failed to pay. But Robert viewed his father as an “ingenious man” and they pulled through.
The weekly paper that came from Howe’s efforts, as noted by a much later journalist, was “formal, faded, battered and yet pretentious”. This was “a look that attaches to the contents as well as to the surface of its pages and is not the mere reflection of its all sorts of paper, its worn-out type, and its blurred and dingy ink, amateurishly compounded out of charcoal and shark oil”.
The front page was normally taken up with government orders and proclamations or important advertisements. Then there was local news, often given a humorous treatment, instructive articles and letters. Overseas news seems to have been cut from English papers or constructed from private letters and information gleaned from the latest arrivals. Howe tried to create a literary sheen for the publication, and some believed he succeeded.
In 1810 the list of things that could go wrong grew longer when lightning struck the printing office, almost destroying it, but the newly-arrived Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, renewed Howe’s appointment and the following year confirmed that things were looking up by granting him a salary of £60. In 1813 Howe published the first natural history and art book printed in the colony, Birds of New South Wales with their Natural History. This was a collection of 18 coloured plates of Australian birds along with descriptions of their activities and environment.
Until the Gazette ceased publication in 1842, George Howe’s work was continued by Robert and then Robert’s wife and son, and between them all the family left a powerful legacy. While criticism that they always supported the government was accurate (Howe later complained of the energetic censorship to which his work was submitted) they spread news and knowledge throughout the colony.
Howe was aware of the significance of his work and yearned to be treated with respect, and was anguished by what he saw as assaults on his dignity, as well as his material circumstances. He sometimes made very strong judgments and complaints. “In England newspapers are paid for before they quit the office; here, we are told, after years of patient forbearance, that accounts furnished shall be liquefied when the person to whom presented shall think proper to pay. This is an insult … Men of sense and feeling do not act so … is not the printer of a paper … to be paid at any time? Dreadful conception.”
A stained glass window in the State Library of New South Wales depicts Howe presenting the first edition of the Gazette to Governor King, who started the entire project by expressing the desire “that the settlers and inhabitants at large should be benefited by useful information being dispersed among them”. Howe fulfilled that mission.
Dr Philip Chubb's career in print and television journalism saw him win many of the country’s top awards, including a Gold Walkley and a Logie. Now an Associate Professor and Head of Journalism at Monash University, he has published three books.
First issue of The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 5 March 1803. Courtesy National Library of Australia.
Stained glass window: 'The publication of the first Australian newspaper 1803', Mitchell Library Reading Room, State Library of New South Wales. Photo by David Fisher.
'Howe, George (1769–1821), Australian Dictionary of Biography, J.V. Byrnes, Australian National University, 1966.
A companion to the Australian media, Bridget Griffen-Foley (ed), Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2014.