The rise and fall of a newspaper genius
J F Archibald, the nervy neurotic brain behind the controversial Sydney Bulletin
Over the next few weeks I will regularly be publishing chapters from a thesis I wrote several years ago on John Feltham (aka Jules Francoise) Archibald 1856-1919 founding editor of The Bulletin – one of the most popular newspapers in Australia’s history. He was also a successful promoter of Australian literary giants such as Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson. An excellent editor and journalist, his name lives on in the Archibald Prize (awarded annually for Australia’s best portraiture) and the Archibald Memorial Fountain in Sydney’s Hyde Park.
Chapter One
This is a short account of J F Archibald’s life and career. He would have had it no other way. He would say that if the Angel Gabriel or Shakespeare himself presented him with copy, he would demand they cut it back.
Archibald is an editor of genius, a journalist of the highest order who unerringly understands which stories should be in his newspaper, and those that should be left out. He is a sub-editor of alchemistic skill, turning leaden prose into gleaming copy. He has the knack of hiring the best and right people, subsuming his own ego so that his charges may scale the walls of excellence.
However, he is not merely a words and pictures man. He instinctively understands his audience, what works and what doesn’t. He knows what will sell and what won’t.
Under his leadership the Bulletin makes money, plenty of it. In an age of flux and change, the Bulletin hold its line – it is nationalist, anti-imperialist, republican, secular, protectionist.
It is, says Archibald, Australian, for Australians. It mentors a purely Australian school of literature and art. It demands humanity and fairness from the law courts. It insists upon an end to English colonialism. As the poet Henry Lawson put it: “The Bulletin is the spirit of Australia.”[i]
Archibald is a friend and mentor to Australia’s greatest poets, artists and writers of his era. He is a passionate patriot and enemy of cant, toadyism and unjust laws; he dislikes the British and their Empire and believes Australia should go it alone. He detests what he calls “fat man” capitalism, all religions especially Christianity, and loathes spiritualism and most other “isms” and “ologies’.
He is a generous man, leaving money in his will for journalists who have fallen by hard times. He bequeaths funds for an Annual Portrait Prize, known today as the Archibald Prize. He sponsors the building of a neo-classical fountain in Sydney’s Hyde Park, a gift he hoped would beautify the city he loved.
If we could compress his 27-year Bulletin career into one emblematic day that symbolised the whole, we would find Archibald at his cluttered desk sorting through piles of submissions, those he selects being sub-edited into coruscating copy spanning the deeply serious to the laugh out loud. He would be giving orders and advice on what to editorialise that week, for example his great crusade against cruelty and hypocrisy – judicial, political, social, religious - wherever it may be found.
The Bulletin became known as the Bushman’s Bible for its attention to and action towards those in the lands beyond the few cities. There was always sufficient copy to entertain and enlighten the bush readership. Henry Lawson spoke lyrically and often sadly of bush life, and the poet’s career might well have stalled were it not for Archibald’s encouragement. That other master of verse, Banjo Paterson, owed much to Archibald’s mentoring and encouragement.
Archibald would also talk to his artists about themes for illustrations that week, including the magnificent American expat Livingston (Hop) Hopkins, a study in artistic and personal elegance and pellucid wit; and the rapier-minded limner Phil May, whose sense of humour was second to none. A little later there would be an editorial conference with his associate editor, the Scot James Edmond: a sort of robust antithesis to the nervy Archibald, gifted with a shining intellect and a robust logic.
And then the writers would arrive, the time depending on how late into the night they might have worked or drank, shyly or confidently presenting their latest work to their godlike editor: writers such as Edward Dyson, Price Warung, Louis Beck, FJ Donohue, Ernest Favenc, Barbara Baynton, Joseph Furphy, Arthur Desmond, Steele Rudd, Philip Mowbray, Victor Daley and Albert Dorrington.
One of Australia’s greatest artists, Norman Lindsay, would show up occasionally hoping to make some money from commercial cartooning.
Many of these names and works may have dropped off the study lists of our schools and universities, and Lawson and Paterson regarded with a tinge of embarrassment, a residual cultural cringe, but they sang of Australia and the song was good – even if they, and their audiences, profoundly disagreed about it. They helped to build the bedrock of Australian culture.
Archibald himself is pictured as nervy, neurotic and a hypochondriac. Colleagues report that his office and desk were littered with various compounds and medicines. He liked a drink or two. Archibald described himself as meager and introspective, all “nerves and self-consciousness and misery”.[ii]
For Archibald, a reformist, campaigning journalist ideally must be free of domestic, national and political encumbrances: “The ideal man to reform the world would be a bastard atheist born at sea. Such a man would be free from ties and prejudices anyhow.”[iii]
Archibald’s given manes were John Feltham, but he preferred to call himself Jules Francois, a pretend identity he adopted because he thought it suggestive of a romantic French-Jewish intellectual. He insisted his mother was French, and that he was born in France. However, his parents were lower middle-class Irish Catholics. His father was a policeman; his mother died when he was an infant.
His portrait shows a man with keen bespectacled eyes, longish hair, a curling beard; radiating a fierce and lively intelligence; very much, we might think, his idea of what a French-Jewish intellectual should look like. The name change folly may have had disastrous unintended consequences for his wife Rosa, and himself of course.
He was a genius, but he hid his gift behind an impermeable wall of editorship, a fortress to which only those he fully trusted could be admitted, and those were few. During his 26-year connection with the Bulletin no word about him ever appeared in the paper nor was anything printed about him in any other paper without his consent. This was not simply modesty, but a cold, hard tactic … “in this world it is only the unknown which is terrible. It is often the business of a newspaper editor to be terrible”.[iv]
So let’s go back and track the life journey of one of Australia’s great and gifted men, a man who so far has lived too long in the shadows of others.
Chapter 2
J F Archibald’s first two big adventures took place within months of each other. Adventure No 1 was more or less accidental. It happened because nothing else was happening. But, as with the second adventure, it was to fundamentally shape his life.
Picture the chirpy, chipper young man of his late teens. Born at Kildare near Geelong in Victoria in 1856, and baptised John Feltham, his father Joseph was a sergeant policeman of Irish descent, a man who loved language and the sound of words; his mother was called Charlotte Jane, nee Madden.[v] His first tragedy struck early – Charlotte died, on October 21 1860 when Archibald was five, the eldest of three children. He recalls his mother (although he was surely too young to remember) as “fragile, svelte, and intensely nervous”.[vi] Not unlike himself.
Nevertheless Archibald got through it, cared for by his aunt and grandmother and received a decent enough education at the local Roman Catholic and National schools, and later at Henry Kemmis’s Warrnambool Grammar School, where one of his young friends was the grazier and future premier of Victoria Jack Murray. From what we can discern Archibald was an eager student, learning some Latin and reading Caesar and Virgil. The fees must have been a strain on his father, whose earnings were 10 shillings a day.
His father, who had had little formal schooling, was instrumental in setting up Mechanics’ Institutes (sort of self-improvement libraries) - and stressed to his son the need to keep on learning, to never be satisfied with one’s level of knowledge. Joseph was, says Archibald, “a most taciturn man, an omnivorous reader, with a preference for the classics”.[vii]
Joseph would set projects for his son, including the memorization of poems and pieces of prose. His favourite English author was Charles Lamb, “for whom his love amounted to idolatry”. The father visited the son at school when Archibald was aged perhaps 12 and to test his progress got him to read aloud Lamb’s lengthy Roast Pig.
That Archibald managed to read his way through the poem, apparently without mistake, demonstrates a formidable memory at the very least and a capacity for hard work. His father told him that if he wanted to be a writer, he must study Latin and the classics.
At the age of 14 his formal education came to an end. He was apprenticed as a compositor in the printery of the Warrnambool Examiner, the local paper. He wanted to be a journalist but for the time being printing and publishing would have to do. It was a start and, in any event, it was an experience that came in useful later in life.
After a time he grew restless with compositing and the journalism yearning proved too powerful to resist. He decided to write an article. It was the obituary of one John Smith.
“The funeral of the late Mr John Smith took place to-day at Warrnambool cemetery. Deceased was a member of the Volunteers, so was accorded a military funeral. The members of the detachment, who have just been served with new uniforms, of which they are very proud, made a long detour through the main streets of town instead of going to the burying ground by the usual direct route. This struck people as being more out of respect to the corps than to the corpse.”[viii]
A bit cheeky, a touch irreverent, a sign of things to come – and he picked up half a crown for his labours, his first piece of paid journalism. As one writer observed, the paragraph contains the seeds of everything which later grew into the Bulletin in outlook, language and treatment, even in “grotesque and cynical humour”.[ix]
Now with runs on the board, he bombarded the Hamilton Spectator and the Port Fairy Gazette with his honed paragraphs. Compositing in the day, writing in the evening, he embarked on the life of a workaholic. Practising five hours daily he mastered two systems of shorthand.
“Thoroughly engrossed and excited by every aspect of press work, he spent little time at home … Twice a week he delivered morning papers, worked all day at 'case', practised shorthand furiously in the evenings, and loitered late at night around the post office, waiting for the last press telegrams.”[x]
And so began his first big adventure - aged 18, he buys a ticket for the train that will take him to Melbourne, the big city where he will, he is sure, make his mark as a renowned journalist and also earn some decent money. It didn’t happen. He failed in his quest to find work on the Argus, rejected by its editor, the distinguished conservative Frederick Haddon.
But he kept knocking on doors. He picked up a job as a stone hand on the Herald, owned by Samuel Winter but this was still too far down the food chain for his liking. However, he was impressed by Winter – he was an “incomparable artist in blasphemy” but a kind and loveable man always good for a handout”.[xi]
With his ambition and energy he found himself work for a month or so on the lively weekly Echo. He then joined the Daily Telegraph as a court and parliamentary roundsman for which he was overworked and poorly paid.
The entire newspaper experience depressed him – with the exception of meeting the writer Marcus Clark who was in the midst of authoring his great work His Natural Life - he felt it mean-spirited and all overlaid with an alcoholic fug that brought out the worst in the characters of his fellow news hounds.[xii] In 1876 he quit, or was sacked. With that Archibald’s initial flirtation with journalism drew to a close, and thus ended his first Big Adventure.
Big Adventure 2 was waiting just around the corner – right there in Melbourne. It says something for Archibald’s character that, out of work, a failure, his dreams of being a scoop journalist on the spike, as it were, he didn’t give up.
He tried something else, something that would help to develop his character in a way that would make him not just a better journalist, but a better editor with political and intellectual insights, a wise mentor, a man of insightful judgment. In April 1876 he joined the Victorian Education Department as a clerk.
He entered his new life with his old name, John Feltham Archibald. But he would re-emerge from his Melbourne sojourn with a new name, Jules Francois Archibald.
We may imagine him elegantly white-suited strolling the streets of Melbourne in his time off work. The very model of an Australian flaneur, the pose appealing to his Francophile imagination, an heir of Voltaire, he would saunter through the burgeoning cosmopolis of around 280,000 – one of the largest cities in the world – pretending to be French. His biographer Sylvia Lawson notes that what may have spurred this French affectation was a certain “young actress” adding however that “It is more certain that he spent long hours talking with a Breton couple who ran the boarding house where he lived at Emerald Hill”.[xiii]
Melbourne then was a city larger than most European capitals. In just a decade the population had doubled, racing to half-a-million. Citizens strutted the streets, bursting with pride as their city boomed. Ornate office buildings up to 12 storeys high rivaled those of New York, London and Chicago. Money was poured into lavishly decorated banks, hotels and coffee palaces. Towers, spires, domes and turrets reached to the skies.[xiv]
He would know about the upheavals in Europe, news would come by ship into Port Philip Bay bringing newspapers, magazines, books and expats. All these new ideas, all these changes - so much to consider, so much for a young man to think about.
The grindingly remorseless Industrial Revolution was changing England’s green and pleasant land; a new class was emerging – a working class, hundreds of thousands of them, laboring in the new industries of the machine age, many on the edge of poverty, many living in squalor. Conversely, it would not escape his attention that another class of people – the aristocracy, the new magnates and industrialists, were living quite nicely thank you very much.
Europe had been wracked by war and revolution. The military genius and dictator Napoleon had died in 1821, in between which France had exploded in revolution, declared itself a republic, executed King Louis XVI, while Robespierre handled dictators’ duties as a member of the un-ironically named Committee of Public Safety.
The Congress of Vienna, convened in 1815 by the four European powers which had defeated Napoleon, sought to establish a new balance of power in Europe which would prevent imperialism within Europe, such as the Napoleonic empire, and maintain the peace between the great powers. The second goal was to prevent political revolutions, such as the French Revolution, and maintain the status quo.
France found itself with a new king, Louis XVIII, a product of the restored Bourbon dynasty and an ally of the British. However, in 1848 Europe was convulsed by a wave of revolutions. From Budapest to Prague, Tuscany to Vienna uprisings shook the streets.[xv]
Although they were eventually suppressed the revolutions gave birth to something of vital importance to Archibald – newspapers. News agencies, including the famous Reuters, which took up home in London, came into being.
These early-mid 19th century European upheavals occurred before Archibald was born, and many more took place while he was an adolescent and a young man. But there was one closer to home, in the goldfields around Ballarat, Victoria, which had an enormous impact on his intellectual and political outlook.
On November 30 1854 a mass burning of government-enforced gold-digging licences took place at a meeting on Bakery Hill. Under the leadership of Peter Lalor, the diggers then marched to the Eureka diggings where they constructed the famous stockade.
Inside the stockade some 500 diggers took an oath on the Southern Cross flag, and over the following two days gathered firearms and forged pikes to defend the stockade. Early in the morning of Sunday December 3 the authorities launched an attack. The diggers were outnumbered and the battle was over in 20 minutes. Twenty-two diggers and five troops were killed. In March 1855 the Gold Fields Commission handed down its report, resulting in all the demands of the diggers being met.
As Archibald would know, the Eureka revolt is the only Australian example of armed rebellion leading to reform of unfair laws. The Southern Cross flag has been used as a symbol of protest by organisations and individuals at both ends of the political spectrum.[xvi] The Southern Cross Flag was of profound importance for the Bulletin in identifying a free Australia.
These world-wide (but mostly European) political, social and economic events would be great talking points when the young intellectuals of Melbourne met in one or other of their favourite pubs. As Richard Wright records, by the late 1860s in Melbourne a “rather self-conscious bohemianism had developed around [journalist and novelist] Marcus Clarke”, Clarke later recalling “I fear we did not live virtuous lives … wicked and natural, and happy.”[xvii]
But there was other stuff in the air: world-quaking, world-shaking thoughts and theories that appeared in the main to be backed by science. There were those 17th century heroes of Archibald – Sir Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Fontelle and Spinoza – followed by the great French philosophes Rousseau and Voltaire. These secular soldiers of the Enlightenment, the advance guard of “reason” and “enlightenment”, filled Archibald’s head with puzzles and debates.
Then there was Charles Darwin, who had pulled into Sydney in 1836 during the historic Beagle voyage collating his scientific discoveries. He published two books which turned existing teleology on its head - he developed his theory of evolution by natural selection, set out in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London, 1859) and The Descent of Man (London, 1871).
The ideas of Marx and his colleague Engels were also floating through the zeitgeist. Marx’s book A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, taken along with Darwin’s findings, seemed to put the nail in the God coffin, as far as Archibald and other intellectuals were concerned.
Marx declared that the foundation of “irreligious criticism” is that Man makes religion, religion does not make man.
“Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. … The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.”[xviii]
Archibald would carry that thought around with him for the rest of his days and it would radiate from the pages of the Bulletin during his vicious and remorseless attacks on established religion.
For the moment, Archibald, a child of the Enlightenment forging his new French-Jewish identity and with a head full of the ideas of his beloved French thinkers Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau and more besides, was just enjoying a drink in his favourite Melbourne pub, thinking on the pretty girls and nice people he had met, and what he might do tomorrow.
Tomorrow he would get the sack again. And then his third big adventure would begin.
Chapter 3
Visitors to the Palmer River region in Queensland’s far tropical north are advised to take special care if they venture into the area for a spot of sightseeing. They are warned that a four-wheel drive is essential because the roads are rough, with numerous creek crossings. It’s wise to carry extra fuel, spare parts, food and water, plenty of sunscreen, a hat, and mosquito repellant.[xix] And be careful not to tread on any snakes – it might be the last thing you do.
It’s a dangerous place for the unwary – and it’s exactly where Jules Francois Archibald found himself in 1878.
The Palmer Goldfields were Byronic - mad, bad and dangerous to know. Back then, a trip to tropical Queensland wasn’t luxury hotels, Infinity swimming pools and pina colada. Men competed against each other to find the best prospecting spots. They prayed they would find gold, enough to make them millionaires, or at least comfortable. They worked hard all day and into the evening. There were jealousies and fights. It was hard, grinding work; some would be lucky but most not. Also, people were scared of the heat – fearful of the tropical north - particularly its supposed impact on the “white man” and his feared degeneration:
“Theories of degeneration and decline in tropical settings necessarily raised the spectre of a decaying community with degenerating community standards, a declining birthrate, and a withering away of the strenuous capacities which had so distinguished the race.” [xx]
So there he was in faraway Queensland, blinking in the sun as he disembarked from the steamer that had brought him to Cairns, thence to hike over the ranges by Douglas’ Track to the Hodgkinson River at Maytown.
It’s easy to imagine that he looked out of place, thin, nervy, in crumpled suit and battered hat, surrounded by burly diggers, construction workers and all the other hangers-on who populated goldfields. Were there any women making the journey, as girlfriends, wives or prostitutes?
In his early-20s now, it is unknown if Archibald was experienced in the ways of romance, courtship and sex and romance. Maybe he was a smooth talker - the Jules Francois persona being something he perceived made him more attractive to women. In general terms we know the 19th century was a theatre of anxiety for many in regard to sex and male-female relations. Change itself had changed, writes the historian of sexuality Peter Gay:
“The very nature of change … underwent change; it was more rapid and more irresistible than in the past. It was also strikingly uneven: advances in the natural sciences did not automatically generate improved medical treatment; the gathering of social information did not quickly eventuate in social reform … change in the 19th century was more often unsettling than exhilarating.”[xxi]
It was, Gay says, a time of progress and for confidence, but also one for doubt, for second thoughts, for bouts of pessimism, for questions about identity.[xxii]
So what was he doing there? Fate, in the form of Victorian Premier Sir Graham Berry, intervened on January 8, 1878 – known for many years after as Black Wednesday. Berry, arguing the need to conserve funds and to vary out promised retrenchments, summarily fired large numbers of public servants, county court judges, coroners and police magistrates. Archibald was one of the suddenly unemployed.[xxiii]
Archibald quickly secured a clerkship – at five pounds a week - with John Walker & Co Ltd, an engineering business which had been established in Geelong in 1863 with a foundry soon being operated out of Ballarat. In 1867 a branch works was established in Queensland at Maryborough, over 1,300 km to the north-east. Its major focus was locomotives, the first of which issued from the Maryborough works in 1873.[xxiv]
After some months in Maryborough, the company sent him to tend to its affairs in the newly established Cooktown, where gold had been discovered on the Palmer River in June 1873.
Cooktown sprang into existence in October 1873 when the Leichhardt dropped anchor in the Endeavour River with government officials and 80 miners headed for the Palmer River. Within just a few months, Cooktown had a population of about 2000 with two newspapers, shops butchers, chemists and about 25 hotels. By its peak year in 1879, there were 49 hotels and 4000 population.[xxv]
Sylvia Lawson records that he travelled to Cooktown on a steamer crowded with diggers, and then up the Hodgkinson River to the now long-vanished settlement of Maytown.
“He worked hard, feeding quartz into Walker's crushing mill, and generally looking after its operations. He lived in a hut with miners and with them survived a food shortage, snakebite and an outbreak of fever.”[xxvi]
The adventure lasted probably only a few months, but it was vital in forming Archibald's main preoccupations. It was his one real experience of Australian frontier life, and, Sylvia Lawson again:
“his scattered recollections reveal an obvious delight with its human contacts: pub-keeper and pub-keeper's daughter, drunken bush parson, the vast variety of argumentative miners who spent their nights writing letters to newspapers, Aboriginals, Chinese, and civilized Frenchmen in the wilds. He picked up what he called Northern Queensland Fever and felt quite ill. His time among them seems to have been more hilarious than heroic, but he carried away an enduring concern for the figure he called 'the Lone Hand': the solitary prospector in the bush, enduring, turning endurance into his own sort of comedy, surviving.”[xxvii]
This concept of the Lone Hand, later essential in the life of the Bulletin and also the title of a magazine he would establish in older age, could not have developed in Archibald if he had not been once, however briefly, “the lone hand” himself. He had wanted to call the Bulletin The Lone Hand … the phrase redolent of the “very salt of the Australian people, the educated independent mining prospector, who, scorning to accept wages from any man, worked on and on from year to year, hoping to the end for the fortune which might never come”.[xxviii]
There was no fortune for Archibald in Queensland. Hankering to return to journalism, sick of the heat and the ever-present threat of tropical illness, he headed south to Sydney where in time he would make a fortune. He got a toehold back in newspapers – working as a clerk on the Evening News. But as fate would have it he met a man called John Haynes, a journalist himself, who befriended Archibald and helped him secure a reporter’s job on the News.
It was to be the start of a new adventure for the young Jules Francois.
To be continued …
[i] Henry Lawson, ‘Autobiographical and Other Writings 1887-1922’ in Stephen Alomes and Catherine Jones, Australian Nationalism. A Documentary History, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1991, p97
[ii] J F Archibald, ‘The Genesis of The Bulletin’, The Lone Hand, Sydney, July 1907, p267
[iii] A B Paterson, ‘J.F. Archibald’, in Clement Semmler (ed), The World of Banjo Paterson, Sydney, 1967, pp135-136
[iv] Archibald, op cit, May 1907, p53
[v] Sylvia Lawson, ‘Archibald, Jules Francois’ in Douglas Pike (ed) Australian Dictionary of Biography Volume 3 1857-1890, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, p43
[vi] J.F. Archibald, ‘The Genesis of The Bulletin’, The Lone Hand, Sydney, May 1907, p54
[vii] Ibid
[viii] Ibid, p55
[ix] Frank S Greenop, History of Magazine Publishing in Australia, K.G. Murray Publishing, Sydney, 1947, p 173
[x] Ibid
[xi] Geoffrey Serle, 'Winter, Samuel Vincent (1843–1904)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/winter-samuel-vincent-4875/text8153, published in hardcopy 1976, accessed online 5 May 2014. First published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 6, (MUP), 1976
[xii] Lawson, op cit, p44
[xiii] Ibid
[xiv] Museum Victoria, ‘Marvelous Melbourne’ - http://museumvictoria.com.au/marvellous/1880s/index.asp
[xv] Rene Albrecht-Carrie, A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna, Methuen, London, 1958, passim
[xvi] Australian Government, ‘Eureka Stockade’ - http://australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/eureka-stockade
[xvii] Richard Wright, Inventing Australia. Images and Identity 1688-1980, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, p93
[xviii] Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, accessed through - http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
[xix] Queensland Government, ‘About Palmer Goldfield’ accessed through - http://nprsr.qld.gov.au/parks/palmer-goldfield/about.html
[xx] David Walker, ‘Climate, Civilisation and Character in Australia 1880-1940’, in David Walker and Michael Bennett (eds) Intellect and Emotion. Perspectives on Australian History. Essays in Honour of Michael Roe, Geelong, 1998, p84
[xxi] Peter Gay, Education of the Senses. The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, Norton, New York, 1984, p47
[xxii] Ibid, p8
[xxiii] Geoffrey Bartlett, 'Berry, Sir Graham (1822–1904)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/berry-sir-graham-2984/text4355, published in hardcopy 1969, accessed online 6 May 2014. This article was first published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 3, (MUP), 1969
[xxiv] The Rail Shop - http://railshop.com.au/prod23.htm
[xxv] ‘The Palmer River Goldfields’ - http://veteransanctuary.tripod.com/Cooktown.htm
[xxvi] Sylvia Lawson, ‘Archibald, Jules Francois’ in Douglas Pike (ed) Australian Dictionary of Biography, Vol 3 1851-1890, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1969, p44
[xxvii] Ibid
[xxviii] J F Archibald, ‘The Genesis of the Bulletin’, The Lone Hand, May 1907, p54