Auckland Examiner

The Auckland Examiner owes its existence and its vitriolic content to Charles Southwell. In Britain he had owned radical bookshops, run short-lived free-thinking newspapers, and spent a year in prison for blasphemy, before coming to New Zealand in early 1856.

Southwell arrived in Auckland from Sydney as a member of W H Foley's theatrical troupe – acting, along with lecturing, another of his occasional occupations. In December that year he launched the weekly Auckland Examiner in partnership with the printer and publisher John Richardson. One of several papers begun in order to challenge the well-established Southern Cross and New Zealander newspapers, it was the only one to last any length of time.

While the New Zealander and the Southern Cross played a key role in Auckland’s political process, the Examiner eschewed such an approach. As the paper pointed out in its first editorial, its approach was guided by the, ultimately, misguided belief that Aucklanders wanted an ‘organ untrammelled by party ties’. (11 December 1856: 1)

The Examiner attacked political hypocrisy and corruption and regularly poured scorn on its more powerful rivals. In the Examiner, John Williamson, Auckland superintendent and New Zealander editor, was referred to as 'Cheap John', while William C Wilson, the New Zealander’s co-proprietor, was 'Swipes'.

In March 1857 Southwell and Richardson were joined by Thomas J Sansom who had formerly worked on both the New Zealander and Southern Cross. Early success for the Examiner led to a move to twice-weekly publication in September 1858, but the Examiner’s campaigns, most notably its condemnation of Governor Gore Browne’s Māori policy, produced notoriety without an accompanying boost in circulation.

The paper’s 21 April 1860 editorial, ‘Blood for Blood’ was particularly controversial, as it called for the head of Wiremu Kingi Te Rangitāke (Te Āti Awa) in response to the news that three men and two boys had been killed at Ōmata. At the time, it was thought Browne was going to send land commissioner Donald McLean on a peacekeeping mission to Taranaki to try to end hostilities following the Waitara purchase the month before. The Examiner’s rivals hit back, claiming that the Examiner’s editorials were inflaming the situation, and increasing the tension between Māori and colonists.

The Examiner continued to give too much space to crusades and not enough to the routine news of the day that most readers depended on. A small, static circulation was increasingly unattractive to advertisers. To compound matters, Southwell was unwell, and two weeks after the publishers closed the newspaper in July 1860, he died of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Three months later, the Auckland Examiner was briefly relaunched by George Laurance, a land, ship and employment agent, and James Hosking, an ex-Wesleyan minister who had temporarily gone back to his original trade as a printer. Advertisements for the new Auckland Examiner, which began appearing in the local papers in September, stated that the plan was to publish a newspaper ‘on purely independent principles, avoiding everything personal or scurrilous’. This was reinforced in the first editorial of 4 October 1860, which, while complimentary to Southwell’s education and erudition, went on to say that it wasn’t appropriate in a time of war to continue with the rhetoric that had made the earlier Examiner notorious.

The second Auckland Examiner only ran for around 6 months, with the final issue published on 21 March 1861.