Kaikoura Star

Kaikōura’s first newspaper, the Kaikoura Herald and East Coast Advertiser, started as an off-shoot of the Marlborough Press. In 1869 it was taken over by a local school teacher, J B Williams, who ran it until 1872, when he closed it down due to a lack of local support.

The town was then without a newspaper for eight years until George Renner, the former editor of Gore’s Mataura Ensign, moved to the region and established the Kaikoura Star and North Canterbury and South Marlborough News. Renner was frank about the newspaper’s political views, writing in his first editorial: ‘The Hall Government shall have our support so long as they act in a manner calculated, in our opinion, to benefit the colony and extricate it from its present uncomfortable impecunious position.’ (Marlborough Daily Times, 9 November 1880: 2)

Renner published the four-page newspaper twice a week. While he was proprietor, Renner tried out a number of masthead designs, finally settling on a graphic of a star with mountains in the background.

In 1905 Renner sold the Star, by now an eight-page edition, to Wilfred Beach Ingram and moved north to establish a new paper, the Pahiatua Era. After a year, Renner returned to Kaikōura where he soon found his own name in print when he and Ingram appeared in court in 1907. Ingram testified that part of the sale agreement was that Renner could not return to journalism in competition with him in the future. However two of George Renner’s sons, Alfred and Cyril, had started a rival newspaper called the Kaikoura Sun in 1906. Ingram was concerned that Renner senior was writing for the Sun, and although Renner insisted he was not being paid, Ingram won the case.

In 1910 the newspaper was bought by Harold Flower. Not long after, Flower purchased the Kaikoura Sun, including its plant and machinery, from Alfred and Cyril Renner. He closed it down and the last issue of the Sun was printed in January 1911.

After Flower sold the newspaper, Albert Burton Clark became the editor, manager and proprietor of the Star for three decades. During that time he incorporated the Cheviot News into the Star.

The Star was a larger format, four-page newspaper when Clark sold it to Frank Bernard Sabiston after the Second World War. Sabiston sold the Star in 1960 after which it went through a number of ownership changes until it was purchased in 1988 by the Marlborough Express Company. The Star was sold again to Fairfax in 2003 and in 2016 the company closed the Kaikoura Star office.

With a reporter based in Kaikōura, Fairfax continued to publish the Star until it sold the newspaper to the Greymouth Evening Star Company Ltd in 2018. In 2021 the Kaikoura Star was still published weekly by the Greymouth Star.