"A fine healthy place": the Role of Local Newspapers in Civilizing the Queensland Bush

Abstract

This paper presents a close reading of Australian local newspapers The Queenslander, The Week, and The Logan Witness. It argues that by representing triumph over local challenges these newspapers also constituted a late-nineteenth-century civilizing process. They played a vital role in generating community cohesion. Stability and civilization were represented to the target audience of families and entrepreneurs as 'natural' and appropriately embodied by colonizers. Embedding a sense of belonging established a 'civilising (sic) goodness' through disavowal of the displacement of indigenous peoples as familiar community practices were enacted. In this highly literate population newspapers, rather than books, provided local Australian content. A case study of the Lahey family, who arrived as South East Queensland became available for serious settlement in the early 1870s, personalizes the settlement ideology produced by local newspapers.