ABSTRACT
George Howe was a newspaper man, and his life, like his trade, stretched haphazardly across the late-Georgian empire. Born on St Kitts to Thomas Howe, government printer at Basseterre, the young Howe was apprenticed to the West Indian printing trade before departing for London in 1790 to pursue a career in journalism. There, he worked for The Times and other English newspapers until his unfortunate incarceration – for shoplifting – in 1799 and his subsequent transportation to New South Wales.2 His previous employment proved immediately advantageous and he was assigned to operate the government printing press on behalf Governor Philip Gidley King. Soon after his appointment, the governor found it ‘desirable that the settlers and inhabitants at large should be benetted by useful information being dispersed among them’ and allowed Howe to return to his former profession.3 From then until his untimely death in 1821, rumours and reportage from his Sydney Gazette trudged steadily along the empire’s labyrinthine news networks, becoming the primary source of Australian intelligence in Scottish newspapers. Thus, by mere happenstance, an emancipated convict from the western edge of the British Empire, living ten thousand miles from the island of his birth, became the voice of Australia in a country he never visited.
