{"id":29695,"date":"2019-08-07T16:52:34","date_gmt":"2019-08-07T13:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=29695"},"modified":"2019-08-07T16:52:34","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T13:52:34","slug":"the-sydney-bulletin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2019\/08\/07\/the-sydney-bulletin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sydney Bulletin"},"content":{"rendered":"

S.T. Joshi’s blog<\/a> today reports that he saw some actual copies of the old Sydney Bulletin<\/em>, while on his recent Australian tour…<\/p>\n

Danny and I also went to the library of MacQuarrie University to look up the Sydney Bulletin<\/em>, well known to readers of \u201cThe Call of Cthulhu.\u201d What was my amazement when I discovered that this was not a newspaper, but a magazine of political, social, and literary commentary, with an abundance of fiction, poetry, and artwork (not a little by Norman Lindsay). In short, this paper could not possibly have printed the news article that Lovecraft quotes in the story.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So we’ve assumed the title to be a newspaper, but it’s not. That Lovecraft states that it “escaped the cutting bureau” suggests its non-newspaper nature. His use of “an old number of an Australian journal” also suggests a journal, rather than a newspaper. Since one would call a newspaper an issue or edition, while a “number” is usually reserved for referring to a magazine or journal. The Sydney Bulletin<\/em> was a weekly title, one of the biggest in Australia.<\/p>\n

In the story it’s a title had by the “the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note” [aka James F. Morton], who though local and provincial “has wide affiliations in all conceivable foreign parts”. A page from it is used as shelf-paper for some “reserve specimens roughly set on the storage shelves”, again suggesting that the paper quality here is a little better than the fragile moisture-absorbing old newsprint of a colonial daily newspaper. The page also contains “a half-tone cut” being “the picture of the hellish image”, again suggesting a paper able to take pictures rather than pulpy daily newsprint.<\/p>\n

Evidently then this is a publication with some small interest in curious rocks and carvings, presumably these being notable in a fresh new colonial Australia which had little other history to hand, and this is why the museum mineralogist was sent the issue (or perhaps just the tear-sheet). <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Hyde Park, Sydney, in 1932.<\/p>\n

The “crouching image” the paragraphs report had gone into the keeping of the “Museum at Hyde Park” in Sydney (there is a real Australian Museum, on the south-west edge of the Park). This may suggest the conduit by which issues of the Sydney Bulletin<\/em> item might have reached “a learned friend in Paterson, New Jersey” who was an expert on mineralogy.<\/p>\n

Technically the real Bulletin<\/em> appears to be classed as a newspaper, much as the Spectator<\/em> in London was classed as a newspaper despite being a magazine in format. There were postage-rate advantages to being regarded by the Post Office as a newspaper, if the title has many far-flung postal subscribers. In the Sydney Bulletin<\/em>‘s case it was apparently held by the “Bulletin Newspaper Company”. <\/p>\n

It also published horror stories, at least in its early “coarse” years. For instance a book collection of Ernest Favenc’s stories (such as the macabre “Haunt of the Jinkarras”, ‘black cloud of madness \/ racial regression’, etc) gives an indication of scale of the Bulletin<\/em> in its early years when it was publishing Favenc…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Stead’s Review<\/em> of 1901 summed up the title as it was in the 1890s as…<\/p>\n

The only distinctive Australian journal which has made any mark outside Australia is the \u201cSydney Bulletin<\/em>\u201d. It is a curious product, clever, wicked, lawless, sarcastic, cynical, scoffing, but it is nevertheless a distinct creation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An academic article on magazine circulation in Australia in the 1920s suggests it was still one of the top national titles in that decade, and had maintained its biting edge — though by then it had added poetry and theatre reviews and the like. The turn toward literature came in 1915-16, and developed from then on, but this was underpinned by a new reputation for financial news and coverage of mining and suchlike. Thus, presumably, it had a new interest to mineralogists by the early 1920s. That section may have been spun out by 1924, as Wild Cat Monthly<\/em>, though.<\/p>\n

From a scan and OCR from 1924 I found a report in the West Coast Sentinel<\/em>… “In recent issues of the Sydney Bulletin<\/em> there have appeared several paragraphs relating to…” a horrible outback massacre in history. This report gives the Bulletin<\/em> item in question. The format suggests that in 1924 the Bulletin<\/em> did indeed have an interest in macabre history and strange doings of the type cited by Lovecraft, and that it published these as short two-paragraph items. <\/p>\n

Another source has the writer Jack McLaren sending in what sound like similar “paragraphs” circa 1918-19, as a Bulletin<\/em> correspondent…<\/p>\n

From Cape York he sent a stream of paragraphs to the Sydney Bulletin<\/em> under the pseudonym of McNorth, while also writing Red Mountain<\/em> (1919), the first of about twenty adventure novels” (By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet in Lovecraft’s paragraphs in “The Call of Cthulhu” he does appear to have the Bulletin<\/em> act more as a reporting newspaper, in terms of having them send a telegraph cable-gram to “Our Auckland correspondent” in order to add a final paragraph to their report. <\/p>\n

Were “paragraphs” often present in the Bulletin<\/em>? It’s difficult to say more about the nature of it without seeing a full run of the Bulletin<\/em> from the first half of the 1920s. After all it was a weekly, and perhaps such paragraphs only featured once a month. But it does not appear to be scanned and online, though evidently it exists in the archives to be seen by S.T. Joshi.<\/p>\n

How did Lovecraft come to know of this weekly (and the museum, placed in its accurate location), a title that appears by the 1920s to have been a sort of somewhat coarsely patriotic Australian equivalent of The Spectator<\/em>? Lovecraft can’t have been sent clippings from the Bulletin<\/em> by his correspondent Geo. Fitzpatrick of Sydney<\/a>, since the two men don’t appear to have come into contact until 1929. But it occurs to me that Lovecraft may have seen issues of the Sydney Bulletin<\/em> in the New York libraries, and been more interested in it than otherwise because it was a potential outlet for paid story publication. He did after all seem to keep his overseas rights, so far as I recall, and these were not grabbed by Farnsworth Wright. <\/p>\n

Incidentally, the Bulletin<\/em>‘s pungent and cutting politics were of just the type to cause the anarchist Morton to have quickly disposed of it, by using it for “shelf-paper” in his museum, had he been sent a full copy of that 1924 “number”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

S.T. Joshi’s blog today reports that he saw some actual copies of the old Sydney Bulletin, while on his recent …<\/p>\n

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