James Curtis was a printing compositor from Fordingbridge in Hampshire, who migrated to Adelaide in 1849. He worked for a period as a compositor on the South Australian, then in 1851 moved to Geelong in Victoria, where he worked on the Victorian Colonist newspaper,
Curtis spent a period with a group of newspaper colleagues on the Ballarat goldfields, but he had no success as a miner and was soon in Melbourne, where he worked on the Melbourne Argus and Herald, and became secretary of the Victorian Typographical Association. He returned to Geelong and was associated with Thomas Comb in a printing business, Comb & Curtis, in Kardinia Street, Geelong.
Curtis travelled to England in 1861, but came back to Australia in 1863 and established a printing press in Ballarat which continued until the end of the century, printing as James Curtis or James Curtis, Caxton Steam Printing Works.
James Curtis became a Spiritualist in the 1870s and this is reflected to some extent in his publishing and printing output. He also wrote about his own spiritualist experiences, notably in Rustlings in the Golden City: A Record of Spiritualist Experiences in Ballarat and Melbourne (Ballarat, 1896). Curtis was a frequent contributor to Ballarat newspapers, under his own name and as 'Austral' and 'Philo'.
