The Opotiki News: Providing local news to the community.

In April, Lachy Paterson, one of our Trust Board members, returned to his home town to give a talk to the Whakatane and District Historical Society. The meeting was held in a building where the Society originally established the Whakatāne Museum in 1972. It was during this time that the Society made a concerted effort to collect local newspapers. 

The building has since been enlarged considerably and is now Te Whare Taonga ō Taketake, part of the Whakatāne District Council’s Museum and Arts organisation, and is a wonderful place to undertake local research. The meeting was open to all, and there was a good number of the Historical Society membership, some Council staff, as well as members of the public. Also present was John Spring, the managing director of Beacon Media, which publishes the Whakatane Beacon and the Opotiki News among its stable of newspapers.

While the Opotiki News is available on Papers Past to 1950, the Ōpōtiki Museum, which holds physical copies of the newspaper, was concerned that issues from later years were at risk of deterioration and wanted to both preserve them and make them more publicly available.  Thanks to a collaboration with the Ōpōtiki Museum and to Beacon Media, the Trust was able to digitise from 1951 to 1972 (plus 1981). While the plan is to transfer these years on to Papers Past, they are now available on our recollect site. In particular, Lachy wanted to thank John Spring, and Lorna Aikman from the Ōpōtiki Museum, for making this possible. 

While the talk was an excellent opportunity to talk about the Trust’s mission and work more generally, Lachy decided he would also talk a little about the Opotiki News, and the sorts of news that they provided their readership.  The paper certainly changed its look over the 1951-1981 period. It started this period with issues of four pages long, with few photographs, and the front and back pages mostly short advertisements.  By 1971, it had a more modern feel, with eight pages, and local stories and a few photos on the front page. Ten years later, the paper had a new red masthead, larger headlines, more photos and stories, and was now twelve pages long. 

Lachy also delved into the paper’s content, which was almost exclusively local, concerned with the local body politics, clubs, sports, schools, women’s institutes, church activities, farming, and such like, cherry-picking a few articles for discussion. He looked at a 1969 story on young women (now aged in their 70s) competing to feature in the town’s annual promotional booklet. The public could pay 2c a vote for their favourite.   Then a local Māori story from 1971, of a Te Kaha teacher publishing her own Māori-language textbook, and in 1981, students at Ōpōtiki College competing in the Pei Te Hurinui Jones and the Korimako speech contests.

Lachy was also curious as to how the paper might have covered larger nationwide issues. In early 1951 New Zealand was rocked by a bitter industrial dispute on the nation’s waterfronts, with watersiders pitched against port authorities backed by the government. The Opotiki News was naturally concerned that their port was also affected, but its coverage was almost exclusively local in nature. They reported on failing supply chains and the increased transport costs for local businesses, in particular butter produced by the local dairy company. The government was actively trying to cripple the union, and in March 1951 managed to induce local watersiders at nearby Whakatāne to form their own break-away union. A month later the Ōpōtiki watersiders had also been persuaded to create their own union. News on the dispute disappeared from the paper’s pages despite it continuing to rage on in other places. It was only in June after William Sullivan, the local member of parliament and Minister of Labour, gave a speech in Ōpōtiki justifying the government’s actions that the Opotiki News mentioned waterfront issues again.  So, while a historian may not get the full national story of the dispute from a paper like the Opotiki News, they can certainly get a sense of what it was like in the smaller rural towns dependent on coastal shipping.

This is what makes newspapers serving smaller towns and districts so valuable, both the historical issues, but also the papers continuing to be published today. They tell local stories that are unlikely to feature in any big city paper. 

Finally, Lachy would like to thank the Whakatane and District Historical Society for providing the Trust with a great opportunity to tell people about its work and for their generous donation to the Trust, and Te Whare Taonga ō Taketake for hosting the talk.