The West Australian

• 1. Introduction

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  The West Australian has been landing on doorsteps in Perth since the 5th of January 1833, making it the second-oldest continuously produced newspaper in Australia. It started life as The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Journal, a modest four-page weekly run by the local postmaster. Nearly two centuries later, it reaches 84 percent of Western Australia's population, a market penetration unmatched by any other newspaper in the country.

  How does a paper born in a colonial outpost become a near-total monopoly? What forces shaped its politics, its ownership battles, and its place in the culture of an isolated city? And what happens when the chairman of the company that owns it gets locked out of the state during a pandemic?

• 2. A Postmaster's Paper

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  Charles Macfaull, Perth's postmaster, launched the first edition on the 5th of January 1833. He owned and edited the paper himself, publishing it on Saturdays as a four-page weekly. The arrangement was modest, but the ambition was clear: Western Australia now had a paper of record.

  The very first book published in Western Australia grew out of trouble for Macfaull. A libel case brought by a Captain Clark resulted in a court awarding the captain damages of 27 pounds. The case was dramatic enough that it became a published pamphlet in Fremantle in 1835. Macfaull kept his reputation, though the verdict took a toll on his finances.

  Over the following decades, the paper passed through a succession of editors and publishers. From 1847 to 1871, Arthur Shenton held the editorial chair, followed briefly by Mercy Shenton. The paper's name and publishing schedule shifted repeatedly. From the 7th of October 1864 it was known as The Perth Gazette and Western Australian Times. It moved from Saturdays to Fridays that same year. In September 1874 a syndicate bought it, renamed it The Western Australian Times, and increased production to two editions a week. On the 18th of November 1879 came the name that stuck: The West Australian. By October 1883 it was publishing three times a week, and two years later it became a daily.

• 3. From Colony to Monopoly

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  John Winthrop Hackett edited The West Australian from 1887 to 1916, the longest editorial tenure in the paper's history. His nearly three decades in the chair covered a transformative era: Western Australia achieved self-government, the gold rush reshaped the colony, and a daily newspaper was now central to public life.

  Delivery beyond Perth was a genuine logistical problem in the early years. The rural railway network, which expanded significantly in the early 1900s, solved it by carrying the paper across a vast and sparsely populated state.

  In 1933, the paper moved into a purpose-built home on St Georges Terrace in Perth, known as Newspaper House. The building served as both office and publishing plant and became a landmark for more than 50 years. When the paper left in the mid-1980s for a redevelopment project, that project ran into serious difficulties and was not completed until 2012 under the name Brookfield Place. The editorial staff relocated temporarily while Newspaper House was preserved as part of a heritage precinct. By 1988, new printing facilities had been commissioned in Osborne Park, and by 1998 the editorial operations had followed.

  In September 2015 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission approved The West Australian's acquisition of The Sunday Times, giving Seven West Media a monopoly over major newspapers in the state. Finalisation of that deal, which also included the PerthNow website, was announced on the 8th of November 2016. In May 2019, the company added Community Newspaper Group's 13 titles to its Western Australian holdings, folding the community websites into PerthNow.

• 4. A Century of Ownership Battles

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  West Australian Newspapers was a publicly listed company from the 1920s onward. In 1969 the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times bought it, and that arrangement held until 1987, when the paper was sold to Robert Holmes a Court's Bell Group. The timing was significant: the rest of Herald and Weekly Times was simultaneously bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

  The following year Alan Bond, through Bond Corporation, took control of Bell Group and with it the newspaper. That ownership structure lasted only a few years before Bond Corporation collapsed. A newly formed company, West Australian Newspapers Holdings, bought the paper from the receivers and then floated in an oversubscribed public offering that raised 185 million dollars. The company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange on the 9th of January 1992. A management fee of 217,000 dollars and an underwriting and brokers' handling fee of 1.9 million dollars were paid to companies linked to former short-term directors John Poynton and J. H. Nickson.

  After acquiring the Seven Media Group in April 2011, West Australian Newspapers Holdings became Seven West Media, described at that time as Australia's largest diversified media business. The paper is now owned by Southern Cross Media Group, which also owns The Sunday Times.

• 5. The Politics of Endorsement

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  From 1922 to 1969 The West Australian endorsed the conservative Coalition at every federal election without exception. That record of consistency makes the departures from it all the more striking.

  An editorial published on the 25th of April 2022 described the paper as "economically conservative, but socially progressive". At the 2017 state election it backed the Australian Labor Party, led by Mark McGowan, over the Liberal-National government of Colin Barnett. It endorsed Labor again at the 2021 state election, before returning to the Coalition at the 2022 federal election.

  The COVID-19 pandemic produced one of the most specific and peculiar turns in the paper's editorial history. The West Australian supported the McGowan Labor Government through the pandemic until the 20th of January 2022, when the decision to delay reopening interstate borders locked Seven West Media Chairman Kerry Stokes out of Western Australia while he was on an overseas trip. The paper became sharply critical of McGowan's pandemic response from that point forward.

  In February 2005, former prime minister Bob Hawke called the paper "a disgrace to reasonable objective journalism". Academic Peter van Onselen backed the claim by identifying ten pro-Opposition front-page headlines in the lead-up to the 2005 state election, with no comparable pro-Government headlines. In May 2007, then attorney-general Jim McGinty called it "the nation's most inaccurate and dishonest newspaper" and called for the editor, Paul Armstrong, to be sacked. Armstrong's response was blunt: he said he "could not give a fat rat's arse" about McGinty's comments.

• 6. Culture, Community, and the Archive

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  The paper's reach into Western Australian culture runs deeper than daily news. The proprietors of The West Australian also launched the Western Mail in 1885. In the 1940s and later, the newspaper published more than twenty editions of Charles Gardner's West Australian wildflowers, a work that captured the region's distinctive flora.

  In 1954, to mark the visit of Queen Elizabeth II, the paper produced a souvenir program. In the 1990s, the photographic archives yielded a series of pictorial books covering subjects ranging from the 1950s and 1960s to a volume called A Small War, and another titled The Migrant Album.

  On the 27th of May 2022, during National Reconciliation Week, the paper published a special wraparound cover under the title Marawar Boodjara, printed bilingually in English and Noongar, the local Indigenous language of the area. The effort was supported by the newspaper's resident Noongar linguist, Alison Nannup. The initiative drew praise from the prime minister. It was repeated on the 28th of May 2023.

  Notable contributors to the paper over its history include Gold Walkley Award winner Catherine Ellen Martin, who received that recognition in 1978, as well as writers including Estelle Blackburn, Robert Drewe, and Dame Mary Durack, who published under the pen name Virgilia.

• 7. Circulation and the Subscription Turn

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  Average weekday circulation fell from 157,000 to 145,000 over a period that also saw the weekend edition drop from 258,000 to 241,000. The paper recorded a fall of nearly 25 percent in profit in June 2016, with staff redundancies introduced as a cost-saving measure.

  By 2021, combined audited cross-platform readership for The West Australian and The Sunday Times reached 4.1 million per month. In February 2022, Seven West Media WA chief executive Maryna Fewster announced growth to 4.5 million per month, a figure that incorporated hits on subsidiary websites including PerthNow, the video program Up Late, a morning radio show called The West Live, and video packages on thewest.com.au.

  In June 2019 the paper moved some of its website content behind a subscription paywall. Thewest.com.au is now available only to subscribers. On the 8th of December 2014, management announced that printed editions would no longer be available in retail outlets north of Broome in the Kimberley region, citing transport costs. Towns including Derby, Halls Creek, Fitzroy Crossing, Wyndham, and Kununurra lost access to the physical paper. The television news operations of Seven News Perth, meanwhile, moved their staff to the paper's Osborne Park premises, integrating broadcast and print newsgathering under one roof.