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Typo: A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review, Volume 2
[trade dispatches]
The Waipawa Mail, a vigorously-conducted up-country paper, deserves special credit for its enterprise in connexion with the recent devastating fires in the Seventy-mile Bush. It at once despatched a special correspondent —one of the best descriptive reporters in the colony—to Norsewood, thirty miles away, and published the fullest and most graphic narrative of the disaster that has appeared, and the one that will always remain as the accepted history of the deplorable event. This report was freely used (though without acknowledgment) by the Press Association, and to its vivid descriptions, telegraphed throughout the colony, may in some measure be attributed the active sympathy and prompt assistance from settlers in both islands.
« Cyclops, » in the Mataura Ensign, writes: —Here is a man who has been foolish enough to bet a twelve-and-sixpenny hat that « bi-weekly » means « twice a week. » The bettee, being a wise man, staked a head-covering that this much ill-treated word meant once a fortnight, and the matter having been referred to an impartial judge, of course he won. He now writes to the imprudent bettor thus:
Dear sir,—Bi the bi, I note that our bet on bi has been decided in my favor bi long odds. You can inform my hatter that my size of hat is bi 35/8 (71/4), value not less than bi 6s 3d, to be forwarded bi Richardson's coach, bi Fortrose. For the present, bi bi.
Well, if I had made that bet I would give the man any hat he liked to choose just to keep him quiet.
The Hauraki Tribune corrects the statement copied into our paper last month about Mr Robert Ross (not B.) Haverfield, that he is believed to be the oldest press man in Australia. It says: « Mr Haverfield's connexion with journalism is of a very limited sort. He had been fifteen years in the colony, and had filled the tickets of explorer, shepherd, and hut-keeper, before the gold discovery, and had shepherded sheep on the Bendigo Flat for years, not having the faintest idea of the boundless wealth that lay beneath his feet, and over which he daily trod. The Bendigo Advertiser was printed as a job at the Melbourne Morning Herald office for nearly a year after it was first started; but Mr Haverfield was not then one of the staff. He edited the Advertiser less than a year—but it was two years after its commencement before he joined it. His successor was Mr Angus Mackay, now or lately editor of the Sydney Telegraph, and who was on the press in Sydney before he joined the Advertiser. Mr Haverfield edited the Courier of the Mines, the first daily on the Victorian goldfields. He killed the Courier in about a year, and has since been engaged on thə Riverina Herald. »
Who is the oldest press man in Australia? Who is the oldest in New Zealand? Typo has a record of twenty-seven years; but there are some in the colony, we suspect, who can shew a much longer journalistic career.