The Age

• 1. Introduction

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  The Age, Melbourne's daily newspaper, first went to press on the 17th of October 1854, just months after gold rushes were reshaping colonial Victoria. Three businessmen launched it: brothers John and Henry Cooke, who had come from New Zealand in the 1840s, and Walter Powell. What those founders could not have imagined was that within decades their modest venture would be selling a hundred thousand copies a day, wielding more political influence over Victoria than almost any elected official, and exposing slave ships in the South Pacific. How did a paper that nearly collapsed in its first two years become one of the most powerful publications in Australian history? And what happened when that power began to slip?

• 2. The Syme Dynasty

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  Ebenezer Syme, a Scottish-born businessman, purchased The Age at auction in June 1856 for two thousand pounds, alongside an ironmonger named James McEwan. From that first edition under new ownership, the paper declared its politics plainly, promising to support "the removal of all restrictions upon freedom of commerce, freedom of religion" and the broadest possible personal liberty. Ebenezer's brother David soon overshadowed him editorially and managerially. When Ebenezer died in 1860, David became editor-in-chief and held that role until his own death in 1908.

  David Syme built The Age into Victoria's dominant newspaper. By 1890 it was selling a hundred thousand copies a day, a figure that placed it among the most successful papers in the world. He used that reach to shape policy. Syme started as a free trader but converted to protectionism, believing Victoria's manufacturing industries needed tariff barriers to grow. The Age he ran supported prominent liberals including Alfred Deakin and Charles Pearson, both of whom worked as journalists at the paper before rising to national prominence.

  In 1882, The Age published an eight-part investigative series by George E. Morrison, a journalist who later became a physician. Morrison had sailed undercover as crew aboard the brigantine Lavinia, a slave ship running Kanakas as cargo to Queensland. Initially his writing expressed "only the mildest criticism", as the source records; six months later he revised his account sharply, denouncing the blackbirding operation in full. His articles, along with letters to the editor and the paper's own editorials, pushed the government into expanded intervention.

  David Syme's will after his death in 1908 contained a provision that would haunt the paper for four decades: no equity could be sold during his sons' lifetimes. The arrangement was meant to protect family control, but it starved The Age of investment capital at precisely the moment newspapers needed to modernise.

• 3. Stagnation and Survival

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  Under Sir Geoffrey Syme, who managed the paper from 1908 to 1942, The Age fell behind. Editors Gottlieb Schuler and Harold Campbell presided over a paper that historian Sybil Nolan described through other observers' words as "querulous", "doddery" and "turgid". It lost market share to The Argus and to the tabloid The Sun News-Pictorial, surviving mainly on the revenue from its classified advertisement sections. By the 1940s, circulation had dropped below its 1900 level.

  Oswald Syme, David's last surviving son, took over in 1942 and immediately set about modernising. He removed classified advertisements from the front page and introduced photographs, changes that other papers had made long before. In 1948 he persuaded the courts to overturn his father's will, then floated David Syme and Co. as a public company and sold four hundred thousand pounds worth of shares. The capital injection allowed the paper to upgrade its production machinery and, critically, defeated a takeover attempt by the Fairfax family, publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald.

  The competitive landscape then shifted in The Age's favour. In 1957, The Argus, after two decades of financial losses, ceased publication entirely. A rival that had exploited The Age's stagnation for years was gone, leaving the Melbourne broadsheet with room to rebuild.

• 4. The Perkin Revolution

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  Ranald Macdonald became managing director in 1964 at the age of twenty-six when his grandfather Oswald retired. Two years later he appointed Graham Perkin as editor. Perkin was thirty-six years old. To shield him from board influence, Macdonald himself took the title of editor-in-chief, a role he kept until 1970.

  Together Macdonald and Perkin shifted the paper's editorial identity from what had been conservative liberalism toward what they called "left liberalism", bringing sustained attention to questions of race, gender, disability and the environment, while opposing White Australia and the death penalty. The Liberal Premier of Victoria, Henry Bolte, responded by calling The Age "that pinko rag", a label that critics continued to apply for years.

  Perkin's editorship ran alongside Gough Whitlam's rise. The Age backed the Whitlam government when it came to power in 1972. Yet the paper was not uncritical. When the Loans Affair emerged as a scandal threatening the government's survival, The Age played a leading role in exposing it. On the 15th of October 1975, The Age called for Whitlam's resignation. The editorial that day opened: "We will say it straight, and clear, and at once. The Whitlam government has run its course." It was titled "Go now, go decently". Graham Perkin died the following day. That editorial was his last.

• 5. Investigative Power

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  In 1984, The Age reported what became known as the "Age Tapes" affair: recordings of alleged corrupt dealings between organised crime figures, politicians and public officials. The reporting triggered the Stewart Royal Commission.

  A series of stories published between 2009 and 2015 about alleged corruption involving subsidiaries of Australia's central bank, the Reserve Bank, led to what the source identifies as Australia's first-ever prosecutions of companies and individuals for foreign bribery. Separately, The Age's coverage of the Unaoil international bribery scandal drew investigations by anti-corruption agencies across the UK, the US, Europe and Australia; several businessmen eventually pleaded guilty to paying bribes in nine countries over seventeen years.

  Journalist Adele Ferguson won the Gold Walkley in 2016 for her reporting on malpractice in Australia's banking sector, work that contributed to the Turnbull government's decision to announce a Royal Commission into the financial services industry. The following year, deputy editor Michael Bachelard won the Gold Walkley for The Age's reporting on the liberation of Mosul after the defeat of Islamic State.

  Gay Alcorn, appointed editor in September 2020, became the first woman to hold that position in the paper's history. She had previously served as The Age's Washington correspondent.

• 6. Ownership and Format

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  John Fairfax Holdings bought a majority of David Syme's shares in 1972. In 1983, Fairfax purchased all remaining shares, making David Syme and Co. a subsidiary of John Fairfax and Co. In 1999 that subsidiary was renamed The Age Company Ltd, formally ending any trace of the Syme name in the corporate structure.

  On the 26th of July 2018, Nine Entertainment Co. and Fairfax Media announced a merger that would create Australia's largest media company. Nine shareholders took 51.1 per cent of the combined entity; Fairfax shareholders held 48.9 per cent.

  In March 2013, The Age abandoned its traditional broadsheet format for the smaller tabloid, or compact, format, joining its Fairfax stablemate the Sydney Morning Herald. The move followed decades of production and logistical change: the paper had left its Collins Street offices in 1969 for 250 Spencer Street, a location that earned it the nickname "The Spencer Street Soviet" among critics. In July 2003, a five-storey print centre costing two hundred and twenty million dollars opened at Tullamarine. The building was sold in 2014 and printing transferred to regional presses.

  The Resolve Political Monitor, a polling project conducted by Resolve Strategic on behalf of The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, began in 2021. It draws on four hundred random telephone interviews and six hundred online interviews each month, with a notional error margin of around 2.2 per cent.

• 7. Masthead and Identity

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  The Age's masthead has been revised multiple times since 1854. The original carried the Colony of Victoria crest. In 1856 that crest was removed; by 1861 the royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom had replaced it, carrying the French motto Dieu et mon droit. Art director Bill Farr offered the paper's own explanation for the choice: "No one knows why they picked the royal crest. But I guess we were a colony at the time, and to be seen to be linked with the Empire would be a positive thing."

  The shield and decoration were altered again in 1967, with the lion crowned. In 1971 a bold typeface was introduced and the crest shield made rounder and less ornate. In 1997 the masthead was stacked inside a blue box with the logo in white. The most recent redesign came in 2002, when a full revamp of the paper brought the masthead to its present form, featuring the name in Electra bold type.

  Photography evolved on a similarly halting trajectory. Hugh Bull became the paper's first full-time photographer as early as 1927, yet photographs did not appear on the front page as a routine matter until much later. Under Graham Perkin's editorship, images taken by staff photographers were run uncropped across several columns, a practice that distinguished The Age visually. A photographer from the rival Herald Sun, Jay Town, noted the contrast between the two papers' visual styles: "There's a big difference between the set-up, cheesy, tight and bright Herald Sun-type photograph and then the nice, broadsheet picture." In 2014, Fairfax Media shed seventy-five per cent of its photographers, a reduction that marked the end of an era the paper had spent decades building.