1804 - 1877 | NSW | Publisher
John Fairfax bought the Sydney Herald with a partner in 1841, renamed it the Sydney Morning Herald the following year and took full control in 1853. He imported Australia’s first steam press and transformed the Herald from a small journal into one of the most influential and respected newspapers in the British Commonwealth. He also started a publishing dynasty that lasted more than a century.
He died in the winter of 1877. By then his newspaper had become a leading influence in the town, loved by some, reviled by others but known to all Sydneysiders as ‘‘Granny’’.
By: DAMIEN MURPHY
Newly bankrupt in 1838, John Fairfax fled Leamington Spa, a popular watering place in the centre of England, and sailed steerage to Sydney with his wife and three children. Fourteen years later he returned home in triumph.
The Fairfax who had left town a ruined man was prosperous enough to repay all debts outstanding in his name, including the legal fees incurred in successfully defending the two libel actions brought against his tiny weekly newspaper by another prominent solicitor in the town. One of the many Dissenters who left England for the colony, Fairfax also paid off £1000 owed by the Spencer Street Congregational Chapel in Leamington Spa, the church he helped found in 1836.
Between arriving in Sydney and his English victory lap, Fairfax had stumbled across the enduring secret of success to owning a press empire in Australia: Monopoly.
With the help fellow members of the Pitt Street Congregational Church - including the Welsh merchant David Jones - he joined with reporter Charles Kemp in early 1841, to buy the then Sydney Herald from Frederick Stokes. They held off bids, first from the James Macarthur-backed Australian in the 1840s and later from Henry Parkes’ Empire. They also changed the masthead to the Sydney Morning Herald on 1 August, 1842, and for nearly a decade remained the only Sydney newspaper published more than once a week.
That monopoly also coincided with the felicitous discovery of gold and as the colony boomed, so too did the Sydney Morning Herald. So much so that when Fairfax disembarked from the victory voyage home in July 1853 he rushed into the office an hour later, at 11 pm, to inquire of the chief compositor the size of the advertisements. He was informed the measurement was more than six pages: ‘‘I cannot realise it!’’ Fairfax reportedly said in amazement.
He was Australia’s first press baron within two months, buying out Kemp’s share of the newspaper and taking his son Charles into partnership in place of Kemp.
Fairfax was born in Warwick, England, to dissenting evangelicals William and Elizabeth Fairfax on October 24, 1805, and completed an apprenticeship as a bookbinder and printer before spending two years in London as a printer and typesetter. He also joined the London Morning Chronicle - a publication that was first to use work by William Hazlitt, John Stuart Mill and Charles Dickens - but returned to Warwick to marry childhood friend Sarah Reading in 1827. They settled in nearby Leamington Spa and he worked in a variety of self-employed ventures, including his first newspapers, the Leamington Spa Sketchbook in 1828, and (from 1835) the Leamington Chronicle and Warwickshire Reporter.
Following bankruptcy, he arrived in Sydney with a total capital of £10 (half of which he won in the ship’s steerage passengers’ sweepstake predicting the arrival date), and worked as a librarian for the Australian Subscription Library (which later became the State Library of NSW) and on the side worked as a typesetter the Sydney Herald and the Commercial Journal.
Within two years he was able to buy the Sydney Herald with Kemp and never looked back. By 1856 gold was redefining the colony and the Herald’s daily circulation: It topped 6,600, a figure exceeded in the British Empire by only the Times and Telegraph of London. His great grandson, John F. Fairfax, revealed in 1941 the family legend that the founding father unabashedly compared his Sydney Morning Herald with gold, saying the ‘‘Herald is the best mine’’.
To a growing colony, Fairfax delivered the latest British newspaper technology - the steam-driven flat-bed press he returned with from England made his newspaper the first printed by steam instead of by hand - and modern British journalism.
But it was journalism leavened by deeply religious and fair-minded tolerance at a time when sectarian feeling ran high.
Previous owners of his publication had taken a strong editorial stance opposing the execution of white men accused of killing some 30 Aboriginal men, women and children at Myall Creek in northern NSW but - thanks to his religious beliefs - Fairfax’s independent evangelicalism saw the Sydney Morning Herald shift to a form of classical liberalism.
It abhorred State interference, such as State aid to churches or trade tariffs, and witheringly denounced proposals to introduce legislation enforcing temperance and Sabbath Observance. In contrast, it supported calls for voluntary moral renewal, self-improvement and national schooling; championed the anti-transportation movement; and sounded a near lone voice in defence of the rights of Chinese workers assaulted in the Lambing Flat riots of 1861.
Fairfax was also foundation president of the YMCA in NSW and a leading supporter of the Sydney Ragged Schools movement, the London Missionary Society and the prominent Catholic social reformer Caroline Chisholm.
Fairfax also was towering presence in Sydney’s commercial world: he was a foundation director of the AMP Society, a trustee of the Savings Bank of NSW and had various directorships with the Sydney Insurance Co, NSW Marine Insurance Co, Australian Joint Stock Bank, Pyrmont Bridge Co, and Australian Gaslight Co.
Fairfax’s extra curricula activities perhaps peaked in 1856 when he stood unsuccessfully for a seat in the Legislative Assembly. The day after he lost the vote Fairfax took his second son James into the business and the following day, January 1, 1857, the firm’s imprint changed to John Fairfax & Sons. In 1865 his third son, Edward Ross, became a partner.
In 1874 Fairfax accepted the offer of a seat in the Legislative Council. ‘‘…..as well for the sake of the work it imposed as for the distinction it conferred,’’ said his Sydney Morning Herald obituary three years later.
He died in the winter of 1877. By then his newspaper had become a leading influence in the town, loved by some, reviled by others but known to all Sydneysiders as ‘‘Granny’’. His descendants took exactly 100 years to the month to unravel the Fairfax hold on the company.
Damien Murphy is a reporter on the Sydney Morning Herald.
John Fairfax, newspaper proprietor, ca. 1861 / unknown photographer | P1/2189. Courtesy State Library of NSW
John Fairfax M.L.C. date unknown, attributed to Edwin Dalton, pastel on paper laid down on linen, Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, Gift of John Fairfax Holdings Ltd 2002, Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program, http://portrait.gov.au/portraits/2002.83/the-hon-john-fairfax-mlc
Sydney Morning Herald, 29 June 1877, p8
The Story of John Fairfax, J F Fairfax, John Fairfax & Sons, Sydney, 1941.
Company of Heralds, Gavin Souter, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1981.