What is the Electric Chronicle?

The Electric Chronicle is made up of authentic news reports taken directly from the major daily Australian newspapers of a century ago. The news stories are selected for historical and contemporary interest and relevance, and for their informative and entertainment value.

The news stories and their headlines have been selected and transcribed as originally published. Text has occasionally been edited for length. Some archaic spelling has been updated to avoid confusion (e.g. "Tokyo" for "Tokio"; "McDonald" for "M'Donald", "Smith Street" for "Smith-street"). To avoid further confusion we also take the liberty of correcting typos we come across from the original stories (while trying not to make our own errors); however, the spelling of proper nouns (names of people and places) sometimes varies from one news report to another — astute readers may find a number of examples of this. We make corrections wherever possible, based on guesses of what is likely to be correct.

An A4-sized 12-page newspaper version of the Electric Chronicle, accompanies each edition of the Chronicle web files. The difference between the newspaper and the web version is that the news stories have been written, edited and organised in modern format, with current affairs cartoons of the time incorporated, where possible, to accompany the text. Individual news reports are often compiled from many stories originally published over a number of days or weeks, edited together to form a continuity. You will need a PDF viewing program such as the freely available Acrobat Reader to view the newspaper, which may also be downloaded and printed out.

The PDF newspaper has been created at low resolution for on-screen viewing, which keeps the file size down, and will therefore load fairly quickly over the internet. The down-side to this is that there is some sacrifice in printout quality.

Each section of the web page Electric Chronicle edition contains a link to an interactive crossword puzzle. The puzzle will open in a NEW browser window. The reason for this is that it should be easier to switch to and fro between the news stories and each puzzle, in order to find the answers, in the news reports, to the crossword clues. Note that the puzzle may take a few seconds to load and refresh itself on the screen. An alternative print-out version of the puzzle is also available for each edition.

Since its inception in 1999, and through its various guises, the Electric Chronicle has been produced, researched, written and edited by Roger Stitson (B. A., M.Ed.), a former secondary school teacher and author of published educational material (study guides, newspaper and journal articles, textbook chapters etc ), other non-fiction works, and short fiction.