AustLit

Nicholas Shakespeare visited Tasmania in February 1999. On his return to England he applied for residency and discovered that he had a family history connection in Tasmania. On his return to Tasmania in late 1999, Shakespeare pursued the connection which he published in the essay Kemp & Potter.

Shakespeare lives in Tasmania for six months of the year and returns to Britain for the other six months.

Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare was apprenticed to the Forbes and Parkes Gazette at the age of fourteen. By 1894, he was launching out on his own, beginning the Lachlander at Condobolin and, later (1902), acquiring the Grafton Argus.

Shakespeare ‘was a founding member of the New South Wales Country Press Association (1900) and in 1903 was appointed secretary of the Country Press Co-operative Co., representing the business interests of country newspapers’. He went on to have a significant political career, being a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and ‘a foundation member (1919) of the Federal Capital Territory Representation League’.

In 1925, Shakespeare ‘launched a family company, Federal Capital Press of Australia Ltd, to start a newspaper. The first number of the Canberra Times appeared on 3 September 1926 and it became a daily on 20 February 1928.

Source: Gibbney, H. J. 'Shakespeare, Thomas Mitchell (1873–1938).', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

Sighted: 13/11/2013