Archive for July 13th, 2009

Click image to view the zoomed version

Blast From The Past is a weekly (or somewhere around that timeframe, as I claim ‘Fiji Time’ as my defendant) post of scans from a 1969 Fiji Times paper which also doubled as a 100 year anniversary issue look back at 1869. Every week  one page scan will be posted, allowing you to have a read of issues, politics and topics that was the Fiji of the past.

When I think of the newspaper life of old, in my head it’s the more romantic view of monsterous printing presses running hugh sheets of paper with the front page with its attention grabbing headline spinning into view, smoky, film noir offices where noisy typewriters and squinting journalists rush about with their stories, perhaps a guy running to tell the big boss editor important news, by which he bursts back out through the double swing doors yelling, “STOP THE PRESS!“.

To be honest, such a scene did exist. Just not in Fiji. The Fiji Times of 1932 was a much different animal back then, on a smaller scale and run by the ever shrewd editor and owner, Alport Barker (who has a library named after him). This page gives an in-depth story from the viewpoint of a Mr R.W. Robson, the man who, after a long back and forth between him and Barker, would later, in 1956 (ironically, 3 months before Barker passed away), become the owner of, at that time, what was a casual 4pm released, 4d ‘newspaper’, and according to Robson, the source of many a nightmare.

His attempts to upgrade the paper was met with much difficulty, from an old printing press nicknamed “the galloping bedstead” which was still being used since 1890, the journalist who got his news over the telephone and no where else, to delivery boys who had to deliver papers to addresses with no numbers, thus relying on local knowledge or for some, just plain giving up.

A hard job indeed, but with his dogged determination, and the help and inclusion of Sir Leonard Usher as editor, Fiji’s own paper was starting to take shape and become the daily source of news that we are now familiar with today. Good lord I sound like I’m being paid to advertise for the Fiji Times. But you have to admit, this paper has some pretty hefty history behind it. And with Blast from the Past, history is what its all about.

Story to be continued next Blast from the Past.