Dr Elizabeth Morrison has been librarianship lecturer and Australian studies research fellow at Monash University and project officer in Canberra for the Academy Editions of Australian Literature. Now an independent historian, she researches and writes about nineteenth-century Australian literary, publishing and newspaper press history. She has researched fiction serialisation in the colonial press and edited two Ada Cambridge ‘newspaper novels’ – A Woman’s Friendship and A Black Sheep. Her history of Victoria’s country press, Engines of Influence, appeared in 2005. She will speak about her current project, a biography of Melbourne Age newspaper proprietor David Syme.