The Riverine Herald - Est. 1863
By MURRAY JOHNSON

Robert's mother was the daughter of Robert Ross, a Scotsman who owned a valuable estate in Jamaica and was married to a Creole. R.R. had hoped to go to Cambridge but the abolition of slavery in Jamaica cut his mother's income from 1500 pounds per year to 300. So he emigrated to Australia in 1838 with 80 pounds in his pocket. He went droving cattle from Albury to Melbourne, then gravitated to Bendigo in 1851. Miners were revolting against the licensing system there and in 1853 Haverfield started the Bendigo Ad vertiser newspaper to champion their cause. He later went exploring and became the first man to cross the waterless tracts from Menindie on the Darling River to Booligal on the Lachlan. Once in 1848, while charting the mallee scrub, he was forced to go six days without a drop of water and had to "bleed" a horse to quench his thirst. In his adventures Haverfield developed a close relationship with the Aborigines whose language he spoke and whose cause he later championed in The Riverine Herald. In 1863 Robert Ross married Marianna Collier and founded Echuca's first newspaper which continues to thrive 133 years later.

At a tribute dinner to mark his 50th year in journalism Bendigo colleagues said: "Your pen has been as a scourge to the oppressor, and has been ever foremost in suggesting, helping forward and firmly establishing the best social movements of the community in which you lived. We can look back with pride to your fearless denunciation of official incapacity and tyranny in the early days of the goldfields, when the taxes of law-abiding citizens were collected at the point of the bayonet; and with equal pride do we acknowledge the rare discriminating justice with which you have held the balance between the rights of labor and the privileges of capital."

Over its 133 years The Riverine Herald has championed many causes, from de-snagging the Murray River to make it navigable to building weirs on it to facilitate irrigation which has made this one of Australia's great food bowl regions. The paper pushed for a fire brigade, a hospital... then more recently a heated swimming pool and more environmental awareness with its Minding the Murray campaign. In 1995 The Riverine Herald became one of the world's first small country newspapers to provide local call Internet access to its community, opening up the world to local people in a way we hope the explorer Robert Ross Haverfield would be proud of.

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