Edward James Stephens arrived in Melbourne in 1853 as a young boy. Stephens served a five-year apprenticeship with James Curtis of Caxton Printing Works, Ballarat and then began publishing a trade gazette.
In 1873, Stephens then established himself in Horsham where he ‘installed his double demy Albion press, hauled in a wagon from Ballarat’. With fellow apprentice Edwin Boase, ‘he worked from Sunday midnight to Tuesday morning, 1 July, when the first issue of the Horsham Times (3d.) appeared. By 1882, with widespread selection on the plains, the paper flourished as the Horsham Times, Dimboola, Warracknabeal, Murtoa, Natimuk, Wail, Rupanyup, Minyip, Drung Drung, Longerenong and Wimmera Advertiser. Liberal in outlook, the editor sought “to promote the weal of the whole community”. His paper, which helped overcome the selectors' isolation and gave them a common voice, grew into a bi-weekly with commodious quarters in Wilson Street.’
In 1878, Stephens assisted Boase with the establishment of the Dunmunkle Standard and, in 1882 he ‘bought the Dimboola Banner from its founder Henry Barnes’. Stephens sold the Horsham Times in 1883 and retired to East Malvern, Melbourne. After suffering heavy losses through land speculation, Stephens then ‘established the Broken Hill Times on 21 August 1886’. (This paper was taken over by the Broken Hill Argus on 20 February 1888.)
‘Stephens was also sometime proprietor of the Omeo Telegraph (established 1884), the Warragul News (1887) and the Yarram Chronicle (1886). In 1889 he bought the Nhill Free Press and settled with his family in Nhill, Victoria. He acquired the Kaniva and Lillimur Courier and Serviceton Gazette in July 1890. He incorporated both this paper and the Nhill Mail, bought on 4 January 1901, in the Free Press: both Nhill papers had printed the poems of local farm-hand John Shaw Neilson in the early 1890s. Stephens sold out to Pharez Phillips in June 1909.’
Stephens ‘established one of the first literary societies in the Wimmera’ and was a significant contributor to ‘the development of the provincial press in both eastern and western Victoria’.
Source: L. J. Blake, 'Stephens, Edward James (1846–1931)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University.
Sighted: 22 August 2013.
