About Dandenong Star Journal

Dandenong Star Journal

Overview

The Dandenong Star Journal is a community newspaper serving Dandenong and the City of Greater Dandenong in Melbourne's south-east, published in print and online by the Star News Group. It is the current form of one of Victoria's oldest continuously published community newspapers: its lineage runs back to the South Bourke and Mornington Journal, first published in 1865. When Star News Group bought the paper in 2013, trade coverage described it as the oldest community newspaper in Victoria, a title it carried through a succession of owners that, by the buyer's account, had included every major newspaper publisher in Australia. The paper reports on Greater Dandenong council decisions, community life, local institutions, sport and the everyday business of one of Melbourne's most multicultural municipalities, and it remains in active publication: it is registered with the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) as a newspaper masthead of Star News Group Pty Ltd (registration dated 6 January 2026), it appears in the Australian Press Council's September 2026 list of constituent publications, and dated articles from the paper have been sighted across 2025 and 2026.

History

The paper's story begins in 1865 with the South Bourke and Mornington Journal, published in Richmond and named for the state electorates of South Bourke and Mornington, covering the land south of the Yarra and west of Dandenong Creek together with the Mornington Peninsula and Western Port areas. In 1920 publication moved to Dandenong, and on 25 August 1927 the paper took the name The Dandenong Journal. State Library Victoria's newspaper family trees and catalogue records trace the subsequent sequence of titles: The Dandenong Journal (1927–1972), then The Journal (1972–1994), a period of zoned editions in the mid-1990s (Dandenong & District Journal, Berwick & District Journal and City of Casey Journal, briefly combined as the Dandenong & Casey Journal in 1997), a return to The Journal (1997–2010), the Greater Dandenong Weekly (2010–2012) and the Dandenong Journal again (2012–2017), before the present Dandenong Star Journal name was adopted in 2017. Issues of the original South Bourke and Mornington Journal from 1877 to 1920 have been digitised and are available through Trove, including material digitised for a First World War commemoration project.

Through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, the Journal passed through the hands of major publishing groups; immediately before its sale to Star it was owned by Fairfax Media's Metro Media Publishing. In August 2013, Editor & Publisher, reporting a Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers' Association item, announced that Star News Group had purchased The Dandenong Journal, then described as a 148-year-old newspaper. The purchase followed four Star acquisitions in March 2013 and Metro Media Publishing's closure of seven newspapers serving Melbourne's south-eastern suburbs in June of that year; against that backdrop of metropolitan community papers closing, the Journal survived under new, family-owned management and was retitled the Dandenong Star Journal in 2017. The paper's antiquity is not merely a masthead claim: its nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century issues survive in the State Library Victoria's collections, the run of the South Bourke and Mornington Journal from 1877 to 1920 is digitised on Trove, and the title's full genealogy of name changes is documented in the library's newspaper family trees — an archival footprint few Australian suburban newspapers can match.

Programming and Content

The Dandenong Star Journal's reporting centres on the City of Greater Dandenong: council meetings, budgets, planning and the municipal decisions that shape residents' daily lives. Its council coverage is routinely cited by other outlets — a Victorian local-government news roundup, for example, attributed to the Star Journal both a Greater Dandenong council vote against exploring directly elected mayors and reporting on an unfavourable budget result that forced the deferral of major projects, including the Dandenong Wellbeing Centre. Community coverage reflects the area's diversity: in March 2025 its journalist Sahar Foladi reported on the Greater Dandenong Interfaith Network's Harmony Day celebration, an event bringing together the municipality's many faith communities, and in December 2025 it featured the Australian Nativity Scene in Dandenong North, a community display then in its twenty-second year, whose organisers publicly thanked the Star News Group team for the coverage. The paper also carries advocacy and public-interest reporting of local consequence — in May 2026 it reported Greater Dandenong's backing for stronger gambling-advertising reform, in a community noted for heavy poker-machine losses — alongside the sporting, school, business and human-interest coverage typical of a suburban weekly, and paid election material published during campaign periods, as in April 2025.

Audience and Reach

The paper's audience is the population of the City of Greater Dandenong — the suburbs of Dandenong and its surrounding districts in Melbourne's south-east — a municipality well known as one of the most culturally diverse in Australia, whose many language communities the paper's community coverage reflects. No audited circulation or readership figure for the Dandenong Star Journal is published in the sources relied on for this profile, and none is claimed here. What can be said on the record is that the title has been published continuously, under its successive names, since 1865, that it is the Star News Group's designated newspaper for the Greater Dandenong area, and that its reporting is picked up and cited by council-watchers, community organisations and other media, which is the practical measure of its local reach.

Digital Presence

The paper publishes online through Star News Group's Star Community platform at dandenong.starcommunity.com.au, where its stories appear alongside those of its sister titles in Melbourne's south-east. Its digital articles are syndicated and reproduced by third parties — a March 2025 community story, for instance, was republished in full by the Greater Dandenong Interfaith Network — and are monitored by news-tracking services, evidence that the online edition is an active part of the paper's publishing rather than an archive. The print edition remains the paper's flagship product, with the website carrying the same local reporting between editions.

Ownership and Organisation

The Dandenong Star Journal is owned and published by Star News Group Pty Ltd (ABN 98 238 557 339), the Thomas family's independent publishing company based at Pakenham. The business traces to 1909, when Albert Edward Thomas founded it in Berwick with the Berwick Shire News and Pakenham and Cranbourne Gazette; it traded for many years as South East Newspapers before taking the Star News Group name in 2005. The group's managing director is Paul Thomas, the fourth generation of the family to lead it, and he is the contact recorded for the group on the ACMA Register of eligible news businesses, which lists the Dandenong Star Journal among the group's seventeen registered newspaper mastheads. The paper is produced within the group's structure of local editorial teams supported by centralised production, sales and administrative services at Pakenham, alongside sister titles including the Berwick Star News, Cranbourne Star News and Endeavour Hills Hallam Doveton Star Journal.

Contact and Availability

The Dandenong Star Journal is available in print across the Greater Dandenong area and online at dandenong.starcommunity.com.au. Its publisher, Star News Group, is based at Pakenham and can be contacted on 03 5945 0666; the group's managing director, Paul Thomas, is the registered contact for the title on the ACMA register, at paul.thomas@starnewsgroup.com.au. News tips, advertising and subscription enquiries for the paper are handled through the Star News Group's Star Community website and the group's Pakenham office.