71 Gawler St, Courier Office (Foundation 1 Op Shop)
If you take a step back from the façade of this building and look up, you will see the Courier name across the parapet. The building was erected as an office and printery in 1884 by Charles Morris Russell Dumas (1851-1935), founder of The Courier newspaper.
Dumas was the son of Mount Barker’s most prominent early public intellectual, Victor Dumas (1806-1882). Regarded as an authority on “times, events and history,” Victor Dumas was a graduate of Cambridge University, and was held in broad esteem as a Latin scholar. His “School for Boys and Girls,” which he conducted in Walker Street from 1855 to 1867, was influential in shaping the capabilities, aspirations and conduct of its many local students, including his own sons. He continued teaching within the public system until 1878.
In 1868 Charles Dumas moved from Mount Barker to Adelaide, aged seventeen, to qualify as a Master Printer. A printing business was already well established in Mount Barker at that time. Alfred Waddy, former clerk of the Mount Barker District Council, had set up a press in the late 1850s. Some of the projects he took on were surprisingly ambitious. For example, John Banks Shepherdson’s exhaustive study, The Practice of the Local Courts of South Australia, (1858) which ran to 471 pages, bore the Waddy imprint (see https://mtbarkernationaltrust.org.au/history-post/marianne-shepardson). More famously, Waddy published the first edition of the Marian, or the Light of Someone’s Home by local author Matilda Jane Congreve, who wrote under the name Maud Jean Franc. The novel, which he produced in four parts in 1859, was an immediate and widespread success, and several editions were later published in England.
When in 1865 Alfred Waddy decamped to Adelaide, his former assistants Abraham Myers and William Jolly took over the Mount Barker printing business. Charles Dumas bought them out in 1872. He set up his presses in a building that had previously been William Chapman’s grain store on the corner of Gawler and Walker Streets (13 Gawler Street), providing general printing services, until October 1880 he launched The Courier – or, more accurately, The Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser. He argued that “a strong Provincial Press is an important factor in the prevention of the centralization of political favors and public expenditure in the Capital City, to the detriment of the country.” Four years later the success of the enterprise justified the construction of this purpose-built headquarters.
Charles Dumas supervised his business as the sole proprietor for 54 years, a record rarely equalled in Australian provincial newspapers. He was also a member of the South Australian House of Assembly from 1898 to 1902, representing the electorate of Mount Barker. In 1883 he married Amelia, née Paltridge, with whom he had three sons and two daughters. Their home, Dumas House, still stands at 11 Druids Avenue, Mount Barker.
After Charles Dumas’ death in 1935 the paper changed hands twice before being taken over by the Marston family in 1952. The paper is still independently operated and remains in the Marstons’ control; four generations of the family have now worked at the press. In 1960 the name of the paper was abbreviated to The Mount Barker Courier, and it became simply The Courier in 1983. In 1982 the paper moved from this site to its current location on the corner of Mann and Hutchinson Streets. At the time of writing it can proudly claim never to have missed a single print run.
The Courier is an invaluable source of information for local historians and genealogists. Older editions can be read online via Trove (https://trove.nla.gov.au), and the Mount Barker Local History Centre holds copies of every edition from 1880 to the current date.
The photo below shows this building and Courier staff c. 1910 (click to enlarge).
