By MURRAY JOHNSON
The Riverine Herald
newspaper was founded in 1863 by some extraordinary men. The paper's first editor was Robert Ross Haverfield (pictured above) .. a drover, grazier, gold miner, explorer and journalist.
He was born in Bideford, North Devon, England in 1819... the son of a Royal Navy Commander and grandson of a German curator of the Royal Gardens at Kew.
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 ba
lance between the rights of labor and the privileges of capital."
Two other pioneers who co-founded The Riverine
Herald were Angus Mackay and James Joseph Casey. Mackay was a native of Aberdeen in Scotland and worked as a headmas
ter in Sydney before purchasing Haverfield's Bendigo Advertiser and helping to start The Riverine Herald. Mackay served as Bendigo's Member of Parliament for 15 years, was three times a Government Minister and drafted the 1872 Bill which made education co
mpulsory, secular and free in Victoria.
James Joseph Casey was also a Bendigo Member of Parliament... a barrister who later became Judge Casey. He is credited with founding the Hansard records of Parliamentary debate, and with important legal reforms which remain today..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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