From the PM to Ian Thorpe: What these Sydneysiders really think of the Herald

Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was born in Darlinghurst and raised by his mother Maryanne Ellery in public housing in Camperdown. He was even a paperboy selling the Herald after school in Sydney’s CBD.

Great newspapers are part of the life of our nation.

I learnt that early. Growing up in Sydney, my first job was selling newspapers after school on street corners. It was a few dollars a week plus some tips, but it started to give me an idea of what people cared about. What they would stop to read, what they would pick up for the train or bus ride home.

A lot has changed since then, and now most of us get our news on our phones. But the role of good journalism remains important. Australians turn to credible and trusted media outlets for their news in times of crisis.

Papers like The Sydney Morning Herald matter – asking questions, talking to people and telling stories that shape a country.

For generations The Sydney Morning Herald has been doing that with integrity. That is worth celebrating. Congratulations on 195 extraordinary years.

NSW Premier Chris Minns was born and raised in the St George area of Sydney and recognises the Herald as being an important public record of “substance and depth”.

On the April 18, 1831, The Sydney Herald brought news from London that the Duke of Wellington’s ministry had fallen, replaced by Earl Grey and his new Whig cabinet.

Front page news in England, but even back then, in the Herald’s first edition, it was relegated to page two, in between real estate ads, notices of emancipated convicts, and the price of Taylor’s Brown Stout.

The Herald understood that the main story was right here on the streets of Sydney – a story far more interesting and dynamic than anything being sent over from the old world.

For longer than any other paper, the Herald has covered that improbable story: how a small penal colony on the edge of the known world evolved into this proud, democratic, multicultural community, and the greatest city on the face of the Earth.

The Herald has lasted the distance. And as we round the bend towards your third century, the forecast is still strong.

In a world of digital global content, we want Australian stories, told by Australian writers. We don’t want to live on a diet of social media content and short-form videos, we want substance and depth.

In short, we want papers like The Sydney Morning Herald that love this great city, and that we can trust every day to tell our story with pride.

A Sydney resident, Simon Tedeschi is one of Australia’s most renowned and awarded classical pianists. A child prodigy, he has performed in major concert halls around the world from the Opera House to Carnegie Hall, with the Herald showcasing his career from his first performance, aged nine, at the Sydney Opera House.

When I was growing up, The Sydney Morning Herald was part of the fabric of life. It was read in my family not only because of my [barrister] father’s court cases, but because, having begun performing very young, I was also curious to see what was being written about my career – reviews, features, ads for gigs.

Wherever I went, it seemed to be there: on kitchen tables, in cafes, backstage, in waiting rooms, folded under arms on trains. Long before everything became instant, curated and atomised, the paper gave Sydney a shared morning rhythm. You opened it with your coffee and, in a sense, entered the day.

Even as a child, I absorbed less the headlines than the atmosphere the paper created: the feeling that this sprawling, beautiful, argumentative city was in constant conversation with itself. Later, I came to understand more fully what a paper like the Herald does at its best: not merely report events, but help a city recognise itself. A good newspaper tells you what has happened; a great one tells you where you live.

That matters especially in the arts. A vibrant city needs more than infrastructure and ambition. It needs memory, criticism, curiosity, and places where its cultural life is taken seriously. The Herald has long been one of those places.

No newspaper is above criticism, and no city is ever finished. The Herald, even today, is a little like family – one may quarrel with it, but the attachment remains. At 195 years old, The Sydney Morning Herald remains part of Sydney’s living conversation: its record, its argument, its mirror, and, at times, its conscience.

As the Sydney Opera House’s chief executive officer, Louise Herron has overseen more than decade of renewal at the iconic building, including its 50th birthday celebrations in 2023. The famous sails have become a symbol of Sydney and modern Australia, and the Herald has featured thousands of stories relating to the Opera House from its conception and construction to its myriad performances.

Sydney makes a lot more sense with the Herald.

While the technology has evolved, it’s still my go-to when I want to know what’s going on, what something means, and why certain people or organisations are acting the way they are. Or when I want a little shot of magic or insight.

There’s a real sense of community about this masthead. It’s a binding force, a common language, a shared experience.

It interrogates and illuminates the city in all its messy, wonderful complexity.

After a while, you can’t help seeing Sydney through the Herald’s eyes.

P.S. I always love the photos.

Sydney-born Ian Thorpe started swimming when he was eight and went on to become one of the sport’s greats, breaking 13 individual and five relay world records and claiming five Olympic gold medals.

I was recently going through my storage box and couldn’t believe the memorabilia that my mother and father had collected over my swimming career.

One piece that took me back was the front page of the Herald, celebrating that first night in the pool at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.

It was an evening I will never forget, and the Herald was there to document not only it, but many great moments from those 16 days in September.

Newspapers are a foundational piece of any democracy and the Herald is not only an observer but an active participant in our democracy over the past 195 years. There is a fragility to any democracy that is not prepared to look deep within itself, to observe and not act – to deal with what may make us uncomfortable with nuance and “lived experience”.

Democratic institutions and fundamentals are being disregarded and devalued in an ever-marginalised world, where agreeing to disagree no longer seems to be tolerable and the marginalised at both extremes are pitted against one another for someone else’s victory. We must place our resolve and zeal behind those that would further the conversation, to lead us and bring about change to the world where we too can feel our place in it.

Many have fought and died for what we have. We should not forget that, lest we may need to attain it once more.

I hope the Herald can continue to be an active and independent participant in our democracy.

George Miller, the Oscar-winning director of the Mad Max and Happy Feet films, grew up in Chinchilla, Queensland. His family moved to Sydney’s eastern suburbs in 1959.

The impression the Herald has made on me goes back a long way. When we were little kids in the early 1950s we’d come to Sydney most years to visit my maternal grandparents.

My grandfather, who was pretty old-school, would sit in his armchair in a three-piece suit, pocket watch, gold chain, smoking his pipe and reading this vast broadsheet with the same intensity we all watch our screen devices today.

By the time we were teenagers we were living in Sydney and the Herald was delivered by the paperboy pre-dawn each morning.

The Saturday edition was hefty. One hundred pages of analogue content – news, features and classified ads. The family “divvied” it up. I always went for the cartoons and comics first.

The first time my name appeared in the paper was when I was due to row in the Head of the River for Sydney High School in 1962. A week before the race I came down with blood poisoning from a blistered hand and had to drop out of the eight. The sports section referred to us as the “hoodoo” crew. It was the first time in the history of the race the school came last.

Although I switched to digital some time ago, my engagement with the Herald hasn’t changed … it’s still the first thing I look at each morning, and I keep checking it throughout the day.

Why? It’s wide-ranging and comprehensive. Its journalism is of such high quality you have this very strong sense of trust in what you’re reading. I always feel rewarded.

Basically, it’s a great use of my time.

Born in Sydney, Geraldine Brooks is an award-winning journalist and novelist who won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2006 novel March. She worked at the Herald for three years until 1982.

The gentleman’s name was David Jones, and his role was to winnow applicants for the 1979 class of reporting cadetships at The Sydney Morning Herald.

For most of 1978 I wore a trench between the campus of Sydney University and that poor man’s office, trudging from my final year lectures to his dingy corner of the unlovely Herald building on Broadway.

Just about every time he looked up from his desk, there I was, brandishing yet another story I hoped might find its way into the paper and burnish my chances of getting one of those few, coveted roles. There was ink in the air from the basement presses and the newsroom was loud with the clatter of typewriters.

The Sydney Morning Herald was then, as it had been for a century-and-a-half, and as it remains, the ideal training ground for an aspiring Australian journalist.

Today, in an age of deliberate and manipulative misinformation, of media concentration in the hands of unscrupulous owners, and a proliferation of online material from non-journalists of varying motives, ethics and capabilities, its role is even more vital than ever.

The Herald retains a commitment to fairness and to the clear distinction between factual reporting and opinion-writing, a line too often blurred in other news outlets.

The Herald is Sydney’s paper, but it is much more than that. It’s our uniquely Australian aperture on the world.

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