A souvenir commemorative edition with a 48 page lift-out featuring local history will be included in Friday’s edition.
The Pastoral Times was the first newspaper in the Riverina, and one of the first provincial newspapers in New South Wales.
When its first edition was published on May 26, 1859 there was no newspaper up-river nearer than Albury, and none down-river between here and Adelaide.
Despite having various competitors throughout a history that is now 160 years old, the Pastoral Times remains one of the longest serving newspapers in regional NSW.
Other local newspapers have included the Deniliquin Chronicle, Riverine Journal, Riverine Advertiser, Deniliquin Independent and Deniliquin Standard.
The Pastoral Times was founded by Dr David Griffith Jones, an Englishman with experience in newspapers who was born in 1816 and came to Deniliquin from the goldfields of Bendigo and Ballarat in 1854.
The first issue of the Pastoral Times was published in a building attached to Chandler’s Store, beyond what became the Federal Hotel. Initially it was published weekly, on a Saturday, and sold for one shilling per copy.
Six years after the death of Dr Jones in 1876, the Pastoral Times was purchased by Mr Thomas Hunter, who later sold to his editor, Mr J W H Wyse in January 1893, thus starting a dynasty which lasted 59 years.
Mr Wyse held the reins at the PT until his death at 54 in 1900, but the Wyse name continued its ownership of the paper for many more years, from 1952 under ownership of the Deniliquin Publishing Company.
A former employee of the Pastoral Times, Mr AT Jones, established the Deniliquin Independent in 1890.
It remained in publication until February 1947 when it was purchased by its older competitor and incorporated under the Pastoral Times banner.
For the next three decades the Pastoral Times was the only newspaper in town, apart from a very short period when a Moama publication tried unsuccessfully to become established.
In 1981 former PT staff established a ‘new’ Deniliquin Independent as a weekly publication.
At the same time a company called Mytho Pty Ltd, which comprised local and regional shareholders, purchased the Pastoral Times from the Deniliquin Publishing Company.
It appointed Garry Baker, a young chief sub-editor of the Shepparton News, as the managing editor and this started his association with the local newspaper industry which spans nearly 40 years.
In 1986 the Pastoral Times bought the Independent and both papers continued to be published for a short time under the same ownership.
The two were amalgamated as of January 12, 1988, but before the first issue was printed the board announced the paper had been sold to the McPherson Newspaper Group of Shepparton.
Four years later another independent weekly publication, the Deniliquin Standard, was established in competition to the Pastoral Times, which continued to run as bi-weekly.
These two papers merged in July 1995 and the Standard was incorporated under the Pastoral Times banner.
A new company was formed, comprising a mix of shareholders from the Standard and Pastoral Times, and it still publishes the Pastoral Times in 2019, continuing the newspaper’s unbroken service to the community since 1859.
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