Saturday Advertiser

One of the liveliest weekly newspapers began as a stand-alone publication but was later bought by a daily. It was also one of the earliest attempts to create a national newspaper. The first issue, in Dunedin, of Thomas Bracken’s Saturday Advertiser, Time-Table, and New Zealand Literary Miscellany appeared on 17 July 1875. Given its subsequent emphasis on literary content, the weekly showed a very practical understanding of commercial realities in its first appeal to potential readers.

‘It will be started to supply an acknowledged want, namely, an advertising medium, which, by being circulated in the chief cities of the Colony, will afford to advertisers a general circulation of their advertisements hitherto denied to them, except at the cost of advertising in half-a-dozen different newspapers.’ (Evening Star, 30 June 1875: 3)

Another selling point was to be accurate train, boat and stage coach timetables, as well as borrowing ‘good literature’ with proper acknowledgements, a claim challenged by the Otago Witness. They also published local, original fiction. Clara Eyre Cheeseman, for example, an early Auckland-based writer, had her first short story published in the Saturday Advertiser on 22 December 1877; her fiction was subsequently serialised in the paper in 1880 and again two years later.

In 1877, the weekly’s title changed to Saturday Advertiser, Time-table, and New Zealand Public Opinion, Bracken claiming the intention ‘to foster a national spirit in New Zealand and to encourage colonial literature’ (Guy Scholefield, Newspapers in New Zealand, 1958: 181). There is some dissension about when Bracken’s poem ‘God defend New Zealand’ (which later became the national anthem) was written, but it first appeared in the weekly on 1 July 1876. The paper was subsequently renamed New Zealand Public Opinion, Sportsman and Saturday Advertiser.

In June 1881 the directors of the Morning Herald, which had begun on 3 December 1877, bought the Saturday Advertiser which, without a previous association with a daily paper, had lacked access to news sources.

In 1884, the daily, pushed by the Otago Daily Times’ growing strength, failed financially and became, with new directors, the Evening Herald. After a brief parliamentary sojourn in the early 1880s, Bracken became a part-owner of the Evening Herald. The evening daily was absorbed by the Globe in 1890, which continued to publish the Saturday Advertiser until it, too, ended in September 1893.

The National Library would like to thank Ian F. Grant for his permission to publish a shortened version of his Saturday Advertiser feature in Lasting Impressions: The story of New Zealand's newspapers 1840-1920. Fraser Books, 2018.