Table of Contents
People of the Hawkesbury, you have a choice to make - either blend in or stand out.
You can either stay as just another nondescript region on the edge of Sydney or you can fight to get your identity back.
My name is Peter Gladwell, you may remember me from such Hawkesbury Gazettes as the ones between 2009 and 2012.
When I was asked to whip up a quick piece to welcome the Hawkesbury Gazette back into local hands, it brought back plenty of memories for me.
Sure it would be easy to focus on my team’s era as arguably the most golden era of the Gazette - when we had amazing community engagement, won 11 industry awards including the best newspaper of our category in all of Australia, were online pioneers and fought hard to make the Hawkesbury a better place.
We had an incredibly talented team who had a mix of local dedication, ability to sniff out a story, engage with our community in the emerging online space and have more than our fair share of fun in the process.
We broke hard-hitting stories about the rise of local eshays, fought for better roads, started the Windsor Bridge fight coverage (how did it later manage to flood?) and covered the flood of our era with online updates almost every hour for four days resulting in the largest surge in online engagement ever at that point.
But all unnecessary self-praise aside, we were just a tiny part of a huge daisy chain that had been doing those things right back to the early days of the colony.
It was these editor ghosts of Gazette's past who always kept us back at work, striving to make each edition just a bit better in honour of those before us and those who were to come.
We all combined over the decades to fight tooth and nail to make the Hawkesbury a better place.
I’d been associated with many newspapers all across Sydney when I arrived in 2009, but I immediately sensed that the Gazette was something special.
The Gazette WAS the Hawkesbury.
I remember asking one of my young journalists what made the Gazette special and she said it was because we were there from the cradle to the grave for our residents.
Your birth would be in the Gazette, your playgroup would get a spot, your primary school excursion pic would get a run with you in the third row, second from the left, your high school achievements would be celebrated, your legendary 100-run cricket partnership with Davo would get a gig and so would the court report of the post-match drunken high jinx.
We were there for you.
The good, the bad and the ugly - all in the name of telling it like it was and making the Hawkesbury more awesome.
Can anyone truly put their hand on their heart and say the Hawkesbury has been a better place in the time since the Gazette shut its doors locally?
Honestly, I don't think any of us can.
We had an awesome thing and we lost it.
Fortunately our community has a rare chance to make things right and help the Hawkesbury get its mojo back.
Sure it’s going to be a major challenge in this era of Tik Tok-sized attention spans but this community needs to now rally behind the new Gazette like it never has never rallied before.
Or just become another forgotten-about region on the edge of a huge city, and nobody wants that.
The choice is yours people. Get on board.
