The appearance of Maxwell Newton’s Melbourne Observer newspaper in March 1971 caught the attention of the Batman’s Melbourne columnist (Keith Dunstan) in The Bulletin magazine.

“As a good Melburnian I have never got over the sense of sin regarding Sunday newspapers. Oh, admittedly they have been coming over from Sydney for years now, but I have always thought there was something nasty about them, like looking at Fellini or reading Portnoy.

“You must remember there was a beautiful purity about the Melbourne Sunday. There were no newspapers on Sunday and this meant for 24 hours every week the world stopped. There was this tranquil period when nobody got killed in Vietnam, nobody died on the roads, Spiro Agnew was silent, and Melbourne girls went unraped. Nothing was lost. It was all there, secure and complete, for Monday morning. Indeed, privately, I even urged Sir Henry Bolte to legislate against Saturday newspapers so that we could have the entire week-end perfect and complete.

“The year 1971 has been hell — our Sabbath has been literally smothered in paper. We had the “Week-ender,” the “Sunday Observer,” the “National Times,” the “Sunday Review,” and the “Sunday Australian.” Now, because authorised newsagents still refuse to open or deliver on Sunday, the buying for compulsive newspaper readers has been difficult. Some pie shops and milk bars have stocked the “Sunday Australian,” some have stocked only the “Sunday Observer,” others have gone for the pure flesh of the “Sunday Mirror.”

“Frequently one has had to visit half a dozen shops, buy half a dozen bottles of milk just to get a complete cover, so to speak. Now some very curious things have happened. On Sunday, March 13, the “Sunday Observer,” published by Gordon Barton, vanished and was replaced on March 20 by the “Melbourne Observer,” published by Max Newton.

“The “Melbourne Observer” was the same size, same shape and almost same name as the “Sunday Observer.” The “Melbourne Observer” presented all the old faces. And nearly everyone was there, even the immortal’ Harry Beitzel on football. On page two there was an unsigned cartoon in the style of the “Sunday Observer’s” Iron Outlaw cartoon which began “Zap me back; we last left our hero being battered about by the merciless bunch. Will Hawk-man get his feathers singed at last? Who will save Victoria’s only Sunday paper? Read man. Read.”

“And so the cartoon depicts a magnificent bemuscled Superman character, perhaps Max Newton, leaping in to save the paper

“Your confused correspondent decided to call on John Crew, managing director of the “Sunday Observer.” “Look,” he said, “we don’t wish to pour the bucket on the ‘Melbourne Observer.’ We wish them well. But I would like to explain that they have absolutely nothing to do with us. We paid off our journalists last week and most of them were rehired by Maxwell Newton, that’s all.”

“I wondered whether he was upset that the “Melbourne Observer” was scarcely a change of name. “Well— yes I am. I could forgive them all, but for one thing. Their policies are so antipathetic to all we stood for. The ‘Sunday Observer’ was a radical newspaper. Thh ‘Melbourne Observer’ is conservative.”

“The “Sunday Observer” sign was still on the building at Fisherman’s Bend. “It’s been a pretty sad business for us,” he said. “We thought we had a good newspaper, but couldn’t go on losing that much money. Two things killed us. First there was the cost of providing a spot news organisation. Max Newton already has one, so his costs won’t be so high. Then there was the distribution. We were not accepted by the authorised newsagents.”

“What about the subtleties of which pie shop sold which paper? Mr. Crew explained. “You must understand that many milk bars and pie shops are sub-agents to the local newsagent. That is, they handle papers after the agency has closed. They couldn’t handle our paper, so we had to go to the milk bars that were not sub-agents. Max Newton’s papers have been handled by newsagents in the past. So it was interesting last Sunday to see piles of ‘Melbourne Observers’ outside milk bars that wouldn’t handle ‘Sunday Observers’ before. But that’s the luck of the game.”

“Meanwhile, Mr. Crew said Gordon Barton’s “Sunday Review,” the stable- mate of the “Sunday Observer,” would continue in production and there was no possibility of it going out of business. “It’s costs are much lower,” he said. “And it’s doing well, in every State. There was a sharp jump in circulation after the death of the ‘Observer’.”

“As a quiet Sunday lover, I wanted to know whether Melbourne really wanted Sunday newspapers. “Yes, they do,” he said. “Our average over the past year for the ‘Sunday Observer’ was between 90,000 and 100,000. The Sydney Sunday papers sell about 100,000 in Victoria. The ‘Sunday Australian’ sells about 50,000 in Melbourne. So that makes a quarter-million who are prepared to buy Sunday papers and they aren’t even marketed properly. Who knows? Maybe we will come back one day.”