About The Gilgandra Weekly

The Gilgandra Weekly

Overview

The Gilgandra Weekly is the local newspaper for Gilgandra, a rural service town on the Castlereagh River in the Central West of New South Wales, and for the farming villages of the surrounding shire. It is published in print and online by Gilgandra Newspapers Pty Ltd, and its owner and publisher, Lucie Peart, is one of the best-known figures in the New South Wales country press: a former president of Country Press NSW and a board member of Country Press Australia. The Weekly descends from The Castlereagh, the first newspaper published in Gilgandra, whose first issue appeared in January 1905, and it remains a working weekly more than 120 years later: the Australian Communications and Media Authority's Register of Eligible News Businesses records Gilgandra Newspapers Pty Ltd as the registered news business for The Gilgandra Weekly and its sister masthead The Nyngan Weekly, and monitored coverage shows the paper publishing through 2025, including its ANZAC Day 2025 edition and end-of-year "Best of 2025" selections.

History

Gilgandra's first newspaper, The Castlereagh, was established in December 1904 by John Alfred Porter and Thomas Crouch, and its first issue — Vol. 1, No. 1 — was published on Friday 13 January 1905. It was a four-page weekly in broadsheet format, although the first issue ran to 12 pages, and by 1907, when its Christmas issue reached 17 pages with a supplement, its masthead was already proclaiming that it circulated "throughout Gilgandra, Curban, Collie, Gular, Armatree, Tooraweenah, Balladoran & Mundooran Districts". In May 1906 P. J. MacManus and J. Foley, formerly of the Orange Leader, assumed control of the paper; Foley later disposed of his interest. The paper reported the district's part in the First World War, including the Gilgandra Coo-ee March of 1915 — its report of 3 December 1915 on a local enlistee is still cited in military service-record research — and the title later settled into the combined masthead of the Gilgandra Weekly and Castlereagh, the form under which the National Library of Australia holds digitised issues from 1929 to 1942, before continuing as The Gilgandra Weekly, digitised on Trove for 1942 to 1953. Reference records name Harold Campbell as a proprietor of the paper, and for much of the twentieth century the Weekly's printing office served the town in other ways too: the 1964 local history A Flashback to Gilgandra of the Past was printed under its Gilgandra Weekly Print imprint. The modern era of the paper began when Lucie Peart joined it as a rookie journalist in 2013; she subsequently bought the Weekly, and under her ownership the business has grown well beyond a single masthead.

Programming and Content

The Weekly's pages are built around the life of the Gilgandra district. Monitored issues from 2025 show the pattern: front-page local news trailed in the paper's "Front Page Sneak Peek" posts, extensive ANZAC Day coverage for the 2025 commemorations, the Tooraweenah Airshow of April 2025 — at which around 1,000 people watched pilot Paul Bennet perform — community arts coverage such as the St Ambrose art show raising funds for restoration, and literacy events including GREAT Day, the Gilgandra Reads Everything Around Town initiative run through the GIL Library Hub. Local sport is a major component: the paper follows the Gilgandra District Cricket Association in detail, including the Bendigo Bank ABC Shield finals series between Curban, Town Services and Biddon-Tooraweenah, with player-of-the-year awards and photo coverage. Peart herself writes and photographs much of the paper's content — many of its 2025 stories carry her byline and her photo credits — and the paper closes each year with "Best of" selections revisiting its strongest local stories. Its coverage area, as set out in its historic masthead and reflected in its current reporting, takes in Gilgandra and the villages of Curban, Collie, Gular, Armatree, Tooraweenah, Balladoran and Mundooran.

Audience and Reach

No audited circulation figure for The Gilgandra Weekly is published, and none is claimed here. What can be said from the record is that the paper is the established newspaper of record for Gilgandra Shire: it has served the town and district continuously, under its successive mastheads, since 1905, it is distributed in print through local outlets — its own promotion invites readers to "get this week's copy in print or online" — and its stories are indexed by national media-monitoring services. Its publisher's other titles extend the group's footprint across the central west: The Nyngan Weekly at Nyngan, and the Narromine Star and Warren Star, which Peart also publishes, according to her Country Press NSW submission to the Federal Government's News Media Assistance Program consultation. The Gilgandra Weekly is listed as a member publication of Country Press Australia in the Australian Press Council's constituent-body registers, including the registers current in 2026.

Digital Presence

The Weekly publishes online at gilgandraweekly.com.au — the content link recorded for the masthead in the ACMA register — alongside its print edition, and promotes each new edition online as it appears, in store and on the web. Its articles are captured by media-monitoring services such as Muck Rack, which indexes Peart's reporting and photography for the paper, and its end-of-year collections are republished across the group's digital outlets. The paper's own domain could not be fetched directly during the preparation of this profile, so the description of its digital operation rests on the ACMA registration, monitoring records and industry sources; a visual check of the live site is recommended at publish time to confirm its current presentation and newest edition.

Ownership and Organisation

The Gilgandra Weekly is published by Gilgandra Newspapers Pty Ltd, which the ACMA Register of Eligible News Businesses lists (ABN 43 000 160 225, registered 5 September 2024) as the registered news business for two newspaper mastheads, The Gilgandra Weekly and The Nyngan Weekly, with Lucie Peart as the registered contact. Peart began at the Weekly as a journalist in 2013, became its owner, and has since expanded to four weekly newspapers — the Gilgandra and Nyngan weeklies, the Narromine Star and the Warren Star — along with additional regional editions, according to her Women in Media profile. She has served as president of Country Press NSW — she signed that body's 2022 submission to the House of Representatives inquiry into Australia's regional newspapers in that capacity, alongside Coonamble Times publisher Lee O'Connor as vice-president — and sits on the board of Country Press Australia. An Australian Research Council Linkage project case study of country-press innovation singled her out as an example of the new generation of regional proprietors, describing how, having begun at The Gilgandra Weekly as a rookie reporter with no newspaper experience, she "assumed ownership of the publication and brick by brick she is building a regional newspaper empire of her own".

Contact and Availability

The Gilgandra Weekly is published weekly, in print and online; new editions are promoted on its website as they appear, and print copies are sold through local outlets in Gilgandra. The contact details published for the business in the ACMA Register of Eligible News Businesses are Lucie Peart, phone 0421 220 388, email editor@gilgandranewspapers.com.au. Readers, community groups and advertisers dealing with the paper's sister titles use the same Gilgandra Newspapers office: the registered business covers The Gilgandra Weekly and The Nyngan Weekly, and Peart's publishing operation also produces the Narromine Star and the Warren Star for their respective towns.