00:00In 1913, long before a single brick of federal capital press was laid, Thomas Shakespeare
00:06stood on a newly named Canberra and told his sons to prepare.
00:10He envisioned a daily paper that wouldn't just report on the national capital, but grow
00:16alongside it and champion it.
00:18By the time Parliament opened in 1927, the Canberra Times was in print, a family operation
00:24with big ambition, guided in its first decade by some lines of poetry.
00:28It lacks assistance against the wrongs that need resistance for the future in the distance
00:36and the good that we can do.
00:42I was an unusual choice for a cadet journalist, a draft-dodging protester suddenly assigned
00:48his police round front.
00:49The police commissioner called my mentor to complain.
00:52They didn't quite know how to handle me over there because every time I'd ever been over
00:55there before they'd been in police custody.
00:57He was told he'd better get used to it and be ready for hell if anyone treated me badly.
01:03Experiences like that taught me what this paper was made of.
01:06We operated with an unshakable independence and we carried the motto of our masthead with
01:12pride, to serve the national city and through it the nation.
01:16There was an enormous throb of development going through the city and that meant that the newspaper
01:25had to keep up in all sorts of ways.
01:28We survived economic slumps and high-stakes corporate warfare.
01:33Through decades of changing owners, our instincts and our identity have remained intact.
01:39I've known almost every editor over this paper's hundred year run.
01:43Some taught me, others worked alongside me, some I hired.
01:47Too many to know.
01:49Too many to know.
01:49All viewed their job as a privilege.
01:52Okay, well the big story of course is the crash.
01:55I've worked with great writers, some became household names, sub-editors.
02:00Nowadays, we know them as producers dedicated to getting the story out in the best possible
02:06shape and photographers and cartoonists, we've been blessed there too.
02:12I've always seen the Canberra Times as a living thing, journalists, advertising, administrative
02:18staff and its printers, all working to a common end, and I've always felt a strong sense of
02:24duty as a steward and a trustee.
02:26I know the people working there today feel it too.
02:31Through these decades, our audience remained uniquely sharp.
02:35No matter what we wrote, there was always an expert in this town ready to tell us if we
02:41got it wrong.
02:42We have to respect this audience deeply.
02:45And when disasters struck, the sky turning blood red during the bushfires of 2003 and 2020,
02:52the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic, that was when Canberrans most respected us
02:58back, turning to us for trusted information.
03:02The job has never been one that you would call easy, but the vocation of the journalist to
03:08bring news of importance and interest to the audience, to be fair, honest and correct,
03:14has remained the same from 1926 to today and into the next century.
03:23The
03:24You
