About Mosman Park Cottesloe Post

Mosman Park Cottesloe Post

Overview

The Mosman Park Cottesloe Post is the southern edition of the POST, the free weekly newspaper published by Post Newspapers Pty Ltd for the western suburbs of Perth, Western Australia. It is one of the four localised editions into which the POST is divided — the others are the Subiaco Post, the Claremont Nedlands Post and the Cambridge Post — and it carries the group's shared reporting, features and advertising with its local pages weighted to the Town of Mosman Park, the Town of Cottesloe and the Shire of Peppermint Grove, reaching down to North Fremantle at the southern end of the group's distribution. The edition is a Saturday paper, delivered free to letterboxes across its district, and it is not a legacy masthead kept alive on paper: the Town of Mosman Park's own published accounts for 2025 record the council paying for advertising in the Post Newspaper on 29 March, 12 April, 11 October and 25 October 2025 — all Saturdays — and the Town's community consultation pages name The Post among the channels through which it publicises planning proposals to residents. The paper the council buys space in, in other words, is still being published, read and relied on in this district now.

History

The edition's roots are two of the POST's earliest suburban offshoots. The parent paper began in September 1977 as the Subiaco Post, founded by reporter Bret Christian and his wife Bettye and produced from a house in Churchill Avenue, Subiaco. It appeared monthly, became a fortnightly in 1978 and settled into weekly publication from 26 November 1980. As it grew, the POST added editions suburb by suburb: Nedlands in April 1978 and Claremont in July 1978 came first, then the Cottesloe Post in August 1979 and the Mosman Park Post in November 1980. Cottesloe and Mosman Park were combined into a single edition at that time, and the combined Mosman/Cottesloe title has served the coastal strip south of Claremont ever since; by the late 1990s the name was established enough to be quoted on the floor of the Western Australian Parliament, where a debate cited "an article in the Mosman-Cottesloe Post". The publishing company moved from Churchill Avenue to a former wine saloon in Keightley Road, Subiaco, in 1979, and in 2006 to Onslow Road in Shenton Park, where it remains. In 2025 Post Newspapers installed its own 24-unit Goss Community press at Shenton Park, ending its dependence on Seven West Media's printing plant, and from 1 July 2025 it took over the printing of Perth's Examiner Newspapers titles. Reporting of the press purchase in May 2025 noted that the Australian Financial Review, which had withdrawn its Western Australian print edition when no independent press existed, was assessing a return to print in the state.

Programming and Content

The edition's local pages follow the civic life of two small town councils and one shire: Mosman Park and Cottesloe council meetings, planning and development proposals, beach and foreshore management, and the long-running western suburbs argument over state planning laws and high-rise development. That watchdog role was acknowledged in the Western Australian Parliament on 28 November 2024, when Dr David Honey, the member for Cottesloe — the state seat covering this edition's home suburbs — praised the POST as a cornerstone of local journalism in the western suburbs, noting that its journalists attend local council meetings and that the paper had given residents affected by planning decisions a forum to be heard. The Town of Cottesloe has also used the paper as its own noticeboard: council minutes from 2018 record a councillor motion for a monthly full-page "Cottesloe News" in the POST newspaper. Beach life is part of the edition's staple coverage: a 2015 issue reported the launch of the surf lifesaving season at Cottesloe Beach, including the rescue of a Mosman Park woman in the Cottesloe surf on the same morning. Around the local pages sit the features shared by all four POST editions: the Listening Post column of gossipy and curious items on page four, running since 1989; the Time Out arts section, with reviews of films, books and restaurants and an agony aunt column; letters to the subeditor; and the long-running series of photographs of readers holding the paper at landmarks around the world, which began in 1993. Classified advertising is shared across the four editions, with a Thursday morning deadline for lodgement through the paper's website.

Audience and Reach

The Mosman Park Cottesloe Post is distributed free to households across its district each Saturday, within a group distribution that runs from North Fremantle in the south to Wembley Downs and Woodlands in the north and east to West Perth and West Leederville. Its territory is a compact coastal strip between the Swan River and the Indian Ocean: Mosman Park, between river and sea; Cottesloe, with its famous surf beach and Norfolk Island pines; the tiny Shire of Peppermint Grove, one of the smallest local government areas in Australia; and North Fremantle at the strip's southern end. Post Newspapers publishes no separate figures for individual editions, and no audited circulation for the Mosman/Cottesloe edition exists. The figures in circulation are group-level claims and are reported as such: the trade journal GXpress, describing the paper's 2025 press installation, called the POST a 50,000-circulation weekly, while the member for Cottesloe's November 2024 parliamentary statement put the group's weekly readership at more than 112,000 readers. What is documented without reliance on claims is the district's own behaviour: its councils advertise in the paper, consult through it and answer it, which is the working evidence of a readership the district's institutions treat as real.

Digital Presence

The edition publishes online through the group's shared website, postnewspapers.com.au, where the POST's four western suburbs editions appear together. The Australian Communications and Media Authority's Register of Eligible News Businesses records Post Newspapers Pty Ltd (ABN 50 008 917 717), registered on 28 June 2022, with the news source "Post Online" at that web address, classed as a newspaper — a formal registration that ties the online operation to the same news business that produces the print editions. Bibliographic references place the POST in its fifty-second volume in 2025, and the group's publishing week can be traced through the records of the district itself: the Town of Mosman Park's accounts list payments for Post Newspaper advertisements and public notices placed through 2025, including a public notice on urban greening published on 25 October 2025. In 2026 the group also launched a North Coast POST for Perth's northern coastal suburbs, reported on the paper's own site — an outward expansion by a publisher whose four western suburbs editions, this one included, continue in their established form.

Ownership and Organisation

The Mosman Park Cottesloe Post is published by Post Newspapers Pty Ltd, the independent company founded by Bret and Bettye Christian in 1977. Bret Christian remains the company's owner and the paper's editor, an unbroken line of local ownership and editorship that sets the POST apart in a Perth market otherwise dominated by Seven West Media and national groups. The four editions are produced by a single newsroom and advertising team working from the Shenton Park office, with local pages assembled for each district and classified advertising combined across the group; since 2025 the editions have been printed on the company's own press on the same site, which also handles contract printing for other independent Perth publishers. The Mosman/Cottesloe edition is therefore best understood not as a small standalone paper but as the district edition of one family-owned publishing operation — which is why it shares a website, an office and a masthead family with its three sister editions while keeping its own local identity, territory and readership.

Contact and Availability

The Mosman Park Cottesloe Post is published every Saturday and delivered free to homes in Mosman Park, Cottesloe and Peppermint Grove, with copies also available through local newsagents and distribution points in the district, including the Mosman Park newsagency and the Napoleon Street newsagency in Cottesloe recorded in the paper's classified pages. Post Newspapers is based at 276 Onslow Road, Shenton Park, Western Australia. The ACMA register lists the company's contact as Bret Christian on 08 9381 3088, with the published email address bret@postnewspapers.com.au. Classified advertisements for the combined editions are lodged through the paper's secure website by the Thursday morning deadline, and readers outside the delivery area can follow the edition through the group's website.