Down memory plain: pioneering Melbourne tabloid that highlighted the everyday goes digital

On 4 December 1925 a woman getting her hair cut by a “shingling expert” at a fete in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs appeared on the front page of Australia’s highest-selling daily newspaper.

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“That’s it, there’s no story,” says Paul Dee, a senior librarian at the State Library Victoria, who adds that it’s a classic example of what the Sun News-Pictorial offered readers: “an unfamous person doing an unfamous thing in an unfamous place.”

Victorians saw their everyday lives on the pages of the Melbourne tabloid from 1922 until 1990, when it merged with the Herald to form the Herald Sun.

Now, 100 years after its debut, contemporary audiences are being given the chance to travel back through the decades when flappers floated down the Yarra in gondolas, hospitals appealed to the public to donate eggs to feed patients, and babies were crowned in the Prahran Baby Competition.

The State Library of Victoria can now digitise the Sun News-Pictorial thanks to a recent donation of the microfilm masters which will see all editions from 1922 to 1954 available on the national online database Trove, once enough funds are raised.

As a librarian working front of house, Dee says the persistent requests from the public wanting to find their families in the paper brought the digitation project front of mind.

“One of the regular FAQs was ‘my grandma won a beauty contest sometime in the 30s and it was in the Sun and I’m trying to find the photo’,” Dee says.

While the Sun reported on international news, politics and other big stories of the day, its strength was its local and regional focus, Dee says. He believes there was a real appetite for hyperlocal news in the post-first world war period, when the publication started out, as a reaction to five years of only reading about the doom and gloom of war in Europe in the papers.

“Often they led with sporting photos – so not international news – just Betsy playing in the Glen Iris golf championships. It’s really confident to say that’s what we’re going to put on the front page.”

But the strategy paid off, Dee says, with the paper’s appeal based on its readers’ ability to recognise themselves in the experiences illustrated in the paper.

What’s more, its format changed what a newspaper could be, previously defined by the dense columns of the Age, the Argus and the Herald.

The Sun was the first daily newspaper to make photographs a significant part of its pages, accompanied by shorter, more digestible text. The paper often let the images speak for themselves, Dee says, to powerful effect in instances such as the 1939 bushfires.

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“The person rugged up in a blanket, just looking desolate – you don’t have to read any words really, you just see it and you know what’s happening.”

By 1930, the Sun had become Australia’s most popular daily newspaper, outselling the Age, with more than 650,000 copies sold each day.

It was a paper for the whole family – cartoons for children, columns for housewives and a finance page. It also enticed its readers with the offer of a free life insurance policy for those who subscribed for home delivery.

And its appeal extended beyond Melbourne because its images spanned throughout the state, Dee says. “You get a person on a farm in the Mallee, people on the river in Melbourne and people getting a haircut in suburban Victoria.”

One of Dee’s favourite photos he’s come across is a lady sitting on a donkey in North Victoria, which he says was also canny marketing.

He imagines the thinking went something like: “We’re going to put this lady on a farm on a donkey in Mildura. She’s going to buy the paper, and all her friends are going to buy the paper from Mildura and that’s going to be an unusual thing that one of us is in the paper of a Melbourne daily.

“I suppose while you’d be expecting somebody famous or the donkey to be the biggest donkey in the world – but no, the story is that there’s no story, and that’s great.”

The way in which the Sun tapped into the appeal of the mundane reminds Dee of the way in which social media operates today, with trends for posting day-to-day experiences.

“Often, the way they appear in the photographs in the Sun is that they seem to be happy doing simple things.

“I suppose a lot of our lives is, it’s not a story. What did you do? Wash the dishes and cook lunch and did all these domestic chores, and that’s 90% of life. It’s not a story, it’s the grind, and maybe that’s what was attractive.”