The native-born daughter of a successful emancipist businesswoman, Ann Bird married Robert Howe, government printer and owner of the Sydney Gazette, on 17 December 1821 at St. Phillip's Church, Sydney. Besides bearing Howe four children and also raising his illegitimate son, Ann also helped Robert with the various tasks involved in running a printing press, newspaper office, and stationery shop. After Robert Howe's death in 1829, his estate, including the Sydney Gazette, was managed by a group of executors including Ralph Mansfield, the merchant Richard Jones, and Ann Howe. Ann later claimed that Mansfield and Jones's management had run the paper down to the extent that it was nearly bought out by the fledgling Sydney Herald. From about June 1832, Ann personally took over the management of the newspaper (ADB).
After dismissing Mansfield as editor, Ann Howe appointed first G. T. Graham, and then Edward O'Shaughnessy - both of whom were already on the Gazette's staff - to that position. Ann supported the liberal government and policies of Richard Bourke, and her paper earned the ire of the prominent landowning class of 'Exclusives' who resisted Bourke's liberal reforms. Most of all the Gazette was attacked for the contributions of William Watt, a convict on a Ticket of Leave who wrote pointed attacks on prominent landowners. Ann Howe married Watt in February 1836, but the marriage lasted less than a year: Watt died in January 1837. Ann had been manoevered out of the control of the Sydney Gazette in early 1836 by Richard Jones, and she would not regain it. Ann married a butcher, Thomas Armitage Salmon, in Sydney at St. Phillip's Church, 9 April 1840. She died two years later.
