Mt Benger Mail

The Mt Benger Mail was one of a number of newspapers, mostly short-lived, which appeared in Central Otago during the gold rush era in the nineteenth century.

John Weatherall began the Mt Benger Mail at Roxburgh in 1880. A brief item in the Bruce Herald of 30 April that year announced that the Mt Benger Mail was about to be published ‘at the low price of 3s per quarter’. It also mentioned that John Weatherall was ‘for several years in the Tuapeka Times office’.

Gaining a reputation as a ‘rag-planter’ in the region, Weatherall had other forays into newspaper ownership – the Central Otago Leader for one – but was proprietor of the weekly Mt Benger Mail until 1896.

Apparently, Weatherall did not initially own the paper’s press, as the Tuapeka Times reported in November 1883 that John Thompson, auctioneer and Times shareholder, had sold him the plant of the Tuapeka Press (closed in 1869) and Mt Benger Mail for £47 10s (about $8,000 today). The same year Weatherall and journalist James Rowe re-launched the Tuapeka Press as a bi-weekly. It was short-lived, possibly coinciding with Weatherall and Rowe filing for bankruptcy – this remaining in force for about a year. After selling the Mt Benger Mail in 1896, Weatherall began the Tuapeka Recorder (the second paper of that name) in Lawrence and it appears to have survived four years.

After he sold the Mt Benger Mail to P J Dunne and William P Matthews, it was reported in the Otago Witness that the new owners had secured new plant, and proposed to remodel the paper. The paper noted: ‘Mr Dunne was for some time on the literary staff of the Waimea Plains Review, and also of the Tuapeka Times, and is regarded as a clever and capable journalist.’ In about 1900 he joined the West Coast Times as editor. He left in 1909, and, moving to the North Island, he subsequently edited the Levin Chronicle and Ohakune Times before dying, aged 55, in 1920.

William Matthews, who worked on the Otago Daily Times and Australian publications as well as the Tuapeka Times, was proprietor of the Mt Benger Mail when he died in January 1904 and the newspaper was purchased by Mr W Jack of Dunedin. At this time, the weekly, published on Fridays and considered ‘Independent Liberal’ in its politics, contained six, seven-column pages and was circulated widely in Central Otago. The newspaper’s premises contained, as the Cyclopedia of New Zealand reported in 1906: ‘an Albion press, Platen jobbing machine, and a good font of newspaper and jobbing type’.

In 1911 the newspaper was bought by the Tuapeka Times Co and printing shifted to Lawrence. After World War One, in 1919, W A Laloli bought the paper and it was again published in Roxburgh. It became a daily in 1920 for a period. It survived, with reduced frequency, until the early 1940s.