Andrew Garran

Who was Andrew Garran?

Andrew Garran, English-Australian journalist and politician, was the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald from 1873 to 1885.

Garran was born in London in 1825. He was educated at Hackney Grammar School in the Hackney borough of London, and at Spring Hill College, Birmingham. He also attended a theologial college in Norfolk, where he trained to be a Congregationalist minister. He later studied at the University of London, graduating with a Masters of Arts degree in 1848. Due to poor health, he spent eighteen months as a private tutor in the Madeira Islands seeking a better climate, returning to London the following year. In 1850 he moved to Australia, where he settled in Adelaide, South Australia.

On arrival in Adelaide he worked briefly as a minister, and from 1851 to 1852 he wrote for the short-lived weekly newspaper Austral Examiner, before it closed due to the Victorian Gold Rush, which saw many people migrate to the Victorian goldfields. Garran himself travelled to Victoria, where he was a tutor in the town of Ballan. He returned to South Australia in 1854, where he became the editor of the South Australian Register.