More about Ethel Turner

[emma_in_dream]

Both Ethel Turner and Louise Mack, another prominent colonial writer, began their publishing careers at Sydney Girls’ High School by establishing their own magazines. Mack edited the school magazine the Gazette, and purportedly rejected several of Turner’s submissions. In response, 17-year-old Turner began her own rival magazine, the Iris, of which she was “editress” with a supporting staff of 10 friends. The magazine included puzzles, riddles, competitions, letters to the editor and notes on tennis matches, as well as Turner’s budding fiction, poetry and essay writing.

Turner claimed that her subsequent lack of success when she attempted to publish her writing with a “real paper” spurred her once again to found her own magazine, but this time with the aid of her sister, Lilian. The Parthenon was first published in January 1889.

The monthly issues ranged from 24 to 32 pages in length. Ethel and Lilian were not only the magazine’s editors, but wrote most of its content under various pseudonyms: Lilian often wrote as “Talking Oak” and Ethel as “Princess Ida”, her name inspired by a Tennyson poem. The magazine sold approximately 1500 copies per month from a print run of 2000, and continued for a little over three years (39 issues), despite the lengthy distraction of a libel case sparked by a children’s word puzzle competition that was launched against Gordon and Gotch.

The healthy subscription numbers and the regular advertising that the Turner sisters
sought out via a canvasser from the likes of National Mutual insurance, Fry’s Cocoa and W.H. Paling’s pianos meant that the magazine was a viable concern from which the editors often drew an income.

Comments

[fred_mouse]

How does one end up with a libel case from a word puzzle competition?

[emma_in_dream]

There was a prize for the most words to be made out of one word. A girl sent in an entry apparnetly containing many made up words and the magazine issued a lighthearted warning to her by her initials.

Her father could not sue the paper but apprently at the time it was possible to sue the newsagency that sold it. Eventually found against the father.

[fred_mouse]

A Very Special Snowflake indeed then!

Thank you for all of these literary posts, by the way. I often don't comment because I don't have anything to say, but I do enjoy reading them.

[emma_in_dream]

I feel like I spam the internet with content about Ethel Turner and Mary Grant Bruce, so I am glad to hear someone is reading it!

[fred_mouse]

I would say that the amount that you post is much less than I'm reading about the minutiae of certain friends lives, so does not in any way count as spam!

[emma_in_dream]

Cough, cough.

[fred_mouse]

My suspicion is, that in all the years I have known you, I have never known the details of any meal you have eaten where I wasn't in the same room....

also, the number of loads of washing/cups of coffee/other repeated activity...

[emma_in_dream]

Yes, I skip those.

[emma_in_dream]

Here's the footnote from the aarticle I found this info in.

Brenda Niall, Seven Little Billabongs: The World of Ethel Turner and Mary Grant
Bruce (Carlton: Melbourne UP, 1979) 15. In August 1889, the magazine published a rebuke to a girl (E.M.) who had entered a word puzzle competition by submitting a long list of words containing only the letters found in “regulation”, some of which appeared to have been invented. The father of competition entrant Elizabeth McKinney brought a libel case in the district court against Gordon and Gotch, who sold a small number of copies of the magazine as newsagents (they claimed around 30 per month), but were not directly involved in its publication. The trial was reported in most major Australian newspapers. See, for instance, “McKinney v. Gordon and Another,” Sydney Morning Herald 25 Jan. 1890: 7.

[fred_mouse]

Thanks!