‘On Saturday, January 31, 1880, the newsboys of Sydney hung about the entrance of a broken-down old building in Castlereagh-street, waiting for bundles of a new weekly paper as they were issued damp from the press. That day, for fourpence (reduced to threepence the following week), the citizens of Sydney could read, for the first time, and in very small print, the columns of The Bulletin.’

So wrote Nancy Keesing in 1955 for  the Bulletin when that weekly paper was celebrating its seventy-fifth year of publication and popularity under its old ‘red-covers’ format. And as most Australians are aware by now, the year 1980 recorded the century of that most famous and at one period significant, Australian publication, for its influence in the 1890s was such that we now recognize that era to have been the genesis of our national culture.