The last years of World War One also marked the arrival of Aussie, subtitled The Australian Soldiers’Magazine, as brought to life under the editorship of Phillip Harris.
Aussie had its genesis in a regimental paper called Honk!, first produced on board the troopship Ceramic in 1915, a not unusual phenomenon. Honk! and later Aussie were produced on a small printing press that Harris brought with him to France.
In 1920 the entire European run of 13 issues of the idiom-syncratic Aussie was reproduced on behalf of the Australian War Museum and the Turnbull Library in Wellington holds a copy of that reproduction. It carries a dedication script that reads “To P.A. Lawlor, with my best wishes, Phillip L. Harris", dated Sydney, 4 July 1922.
It was Harris who determinedly kept Aussie alive, conducting the first edition “in civvies” in April 1920 with the new subtitle of The Cheerful Monthly. At the outset, Harris aspired to the goal of transferring “the grand esprit de corps which won the great battles of War into an esprit de nation to win the great battles of peace", and for some time Aussie’s masthead page carried the tagline “The organ of Australianism", later replaced by the glib phrase “The only paper that is ever stolen”.
At some early point– and this is beyond the reach of my research – the editorship of Phillip Harris stopped and the magazine’s letterpress became the responsibility of Walter Jago working with fellow journalist John Barr. A good source for a review of the legacy of Harris is Amanda Laugesen’s article, "Aussie Magazine and the Making of Digger Culture during the Great War", published in the National Library of Australia News, November 2003. [See link named 'Digger Culture' at top of page]
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