Little Un

Little Un appeared in Tauranga as an evening daily between December 1884 and April 1885.

Its name clearly referred to its unusual size. Little Un was published in a quarto format and cost ½d a copy. Appropriately, the paper’s Latin motto was ‘Multum in parvo’- loosely translated in this instance to suggest, rather optimistically, a considerable amount of information condensed into few words.

The four-page paper was conventional in other ways. It generally carried about 60 percent advertising, a significant amount of which was for a diverse range of items available from owner T W Rhodes’ stationery, books, toys and fancy goods shop.

The paper carried short local news items, often about ship arrivals and cargoes, and truncated cablegrams of international news. There were also brief telegraphic items from other New Zealand cities and towns.

During its short life the Little Un was a trenchant critic of the local borough council, as this quote reprinted in the Thames Star in 1885 shows:

‘Is this lovely city asleep? What are those sleeping beauties, the members of our Borough Council doing? Talking railway we presume, and allowing such trivial matters as mail service, harbour improvements, wharves, etc to slide’ (Thames Star, 22 January 1885: 2)

As the Auckland Star put it on 11 April 1885, ‘The Little Un of Tauranga, after living 101 days, has developed into a bigger one’ (Auckland Star, 11 April 1885: 2). This was the tri-weekly Tauranga Evening News which remained in Rhodes family ownership.

The conventionally-sized newspaper appeared almost immediately in the same month the Little Un closed. In mid-1887, its then-owner Richard Rhodes moved to Coromandel and established the twice-weekly Coromandel News and Peninsula Gazette that August. In time, this became the Coromandel Country News and survived until late 1930.