Thirty-one years have passed since Nicholas Shand dreamed up this newspaper and gathered a band of fellow dreamers to help him make it real.
In those 31 years The Echo has grown, like a magic beanstalk, far taller than we ever imagined, and it is now a feature of Shire life.
Our ongoing series on the history of our beloved rainbow rag continues this week, written by the newspaper’s longest-serving drudge, David Lovejoy.
So far in the story, Nicholas Shand has been unable to get local media to cover police hooliganism in the Main Arm Valley, and has invited David Lovejoy to join him in starting a newspaper…
A new nest
We rented an upper-storey open-plan office in Mullumbimby, heaved my typesetting equipment up the stairs and made a darkroom out of cut-up black garbage bags. Nicholas contributed a large, horseshoe-shaped desk, which was perfect for a budding editor.
He had lined up a local printer, Andrew Bradley, whose press could print two A4 pages at once, and employed Dorothy Mullins, ex-Advocate and Northern Star, to help him sell advertising. My wife Wendy was to help me with the pre-press production and a friend of ours, Carol Page, joined us to do typing and general office work.
Masthead is made
Several brainstorming sessions fuelled by red wine provided the name for our enterprise. It was to be the grandly reverberating Brunswick Valley Echo, a name which shed some of its resonance when over the years it evolved into the Brunswick-Byron Echo and finally the Byron Shire Echo. Local artist the late Geoff Williams designed an elegant logo for the banner, which is still in use four decades on.
Andrew Bradley’s minuscule press laboured for many hours before delivering three thousand copies of the fledgling newspaper, dated June 11, 1986. It consisted of twenty pages and had taken a prodigious amount of energy to produce. When The Echo crew woke up groaning in the bottle-strewn office the morning after the launch, I half expected Nicholas to call off the whole thing: could we possibly continue to work that hard for week after week without end? But he called us together and we started to climb Mount Deadline all over again, the second time for the sake of a mere twelve pages.
Colourful start
In the very first edition Jim Brokenshire, who had run the Mullumbimby Advocate for many years, gave his imprimatur with an article entitled ‘New Local Rag’, describing local papers of the past and accurately predicting some of the tribulations we could expect. When Jim needed to retire he had sold his paper to the company that owned the Northern Star, which promptly moved it to Ballina to the dismay of Mullum residents.
Letters featured from the beginning, with the first one written by my son Hans, then aged thirteen.
Also in the first edition was a review of the Pacific Players’ production of Inherit the Wind. It was written by Nicholas who, under the byline ‘E K Hornbeck’, indulgently assessed his own performance of the role of journalist E K Hornbeck in the play.
In its first year of publication The Echo settled down to a regular sixteen A4 pages every week. There was almost always a controversial editorial piece on Council or social matters, but the initial advertisers took it in their stride. The big supporters from the beginning were Mallams Supermarket and Santos Health Foods, but some smaller companies were also very loyal. The warmth of the newspaper’s reception resulted in just sufficient funds for us to continue from week to week – or at least it was once accounting problems had been sorted out. After his inaugural burst of advertising sales, Nicholas was puzzled by our lack of cash, until we realised that after selling it was customary to send out invoices, a detail we had neglected.
Controversy surrounded us from the beginning, but not just the political variety.
Chincogan stoush
I wrote a piece about climbing Mt Chincogan, which in those days could be done, although it involved trespassing through one or other of the properties that surround the hill. Unfortunately I was too specific about my route, and the landowner in question, after a night stewing in the pub, rampaged through the newspaper office and upended Nicholas’s huge desk with berserker fury. When the editor did not flinch, the aggrieved party went downstairs, got into his car and rammed the front door of the building, collecting Nicholas’s car on the way.
Loss of the car was not such a bad thing. It was an ancient blue Corona and its cloth roof lining, held in place with masking tape, would sometimes descend on the driver at critical junctures. As the windows could not close, stray cats would use the car as a urinal when the editor had one of his many overnight sessions at the office. Loss of access to Mt Chincogan was, however, a sad consequence of these events, when the landowners closed their properties to climbers.
Mighty McDuck
Issue number eight saw the first appearance of ‘Our Overseas Correspondent’. It was in fact an old friend of mine, Michael McDonald, who was living on a farm in Tasmania. He continued sending us brilliantly funny articles every month until he eventually fetched up in Byron Shire in person and took a permanent job with The Echo.
It would be more accurate to say ‘jobs’, as McDuck was at various times editor, artist, Council-watcher and whimsical humorist right up until his well-earned but universally regretted retirement in August this year.
More Echo history articles
The end of fun: David Lovejoy concludes the story of the...
While the drama of general manager Max Eastcott’s departure was playing out, The Echo passed its tenth birthday, and we marked the jubilee with a fourth awards night.
How do you dismiss a general manager?
Founding editor Nicholas Shand returned from his long-service leave at the end of March, 1996. He was highly amused at the comic opera scenario playing out in Council, and at The Echo’s unavoidable central role in it.
The danger of delegated authority as The Echo gambles its reputation...
When in February 1996 Fast Buck$ obtained a file that described a developer in Byron Bay obtaining preferential treatment from Council, he published an advertisement in The Echo headed, ‘Something stinks at Hog’s Breath’.
Changing Council and premises
By the election of September 1995 most people had had enough of Cr Ross Tucker and his crew. Although at that stage the evidence of the colossal mismanagement of Council’s planning and finances had yet to emerge
Ross and Max to the fore: Dirty tactics key to undermining...
As the Club Med battle described in the previous episode approached its climax, the leader of Council’s conservatives, Ross Tucker, decided on a diversion.
Club Med and the Gang of Six
By the beginning of 1993 The Echo had outgrown its A4 page size, and our first large-format edition appeared in March that year. The increased work combined with the ritual of putting the paper to bed on Monday nights became quite stressful.
The newspaper wars and A Small Wooden Tray Called Albert
In the mid-nineties the local newspaper scene was heating up almost as much as the always feverish local politics.
Re-zoning back on the agenda: Beating off the Academy rort
During the 1987–91 term of Council an application was made to develop a large site at Broken Head as an ‘academy’.
Expansionist plans! The Echo embarks on the Lismore foray: a town...
A major milestone in The Echo’s history occurred in 1991: we decided to start another weekly newspaper.
The Echo – The Thinking Dog’s Paper
Thirty-one years have passed since Nicholas Shand dreamed up this newspaper and gathered a band of fellow dreamers to help him make it real.
Printers and politicians: The Echo gives voice to the community
After the first year we moved the newspaper to Brunswick Heads. Lured by cheap rent, we took three small shops in an arcade and filled them with the newspaper office, production facilities and, significantly, a printing press.
The Echo dream bursts into being with a dash of controversy
Part two: So far in the story, Nicholas Shand has been unable to get local media to cover police hooliganism in the Main Arm Valley, and has invited David Lovejoy to join him in starting a newspaper…
Echo beginnings: Tales from the Magic Beanstalk…
Thirty-one years have passed since Nicholas Shand dreamed up this newspaper and collected a band of similar dreamers to help him make it real. In those 31 years The Echo has grown, like a magic beanstalk, far taller than we ever imagined, and it is now one of the primary institutions of Byron Shire.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
