HE APPEARED on the front page in May 1979 with a top price bull just sold for $30,000. Nine years earlier a picture taken at a bull sale on his farm dominated the front page. And in the years in between Clive McEachern was on the front page of ''the bible of the bush'' again but this time in the worst of circumstances, after fire burnt out his farm.
The editions of Stock and Land in question might be decades old but in the kitchen of the McEachern's wool and beef property they are still at hand. As we sit around the McEacherns' kitchen table discussing the rural newspaper that is about to turn 100, Clive's wife Kate says she has a ''cupboard-full'' of clippings from Stock and Land collected over the years.
And in a flash, she produces the complete editions of both the 1970 and 1979 papers featuring the bull sale and her husband. But the front page of the February 1977 edition with a picture of Clive on the burnt-out farm proves a bit harder to find.
The McEacherns are devoted readers of the weekly rural paper Mr McEachern describes as ''the bible of the bush''. Mr McEachern's typical routine is to read it while sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning between about 9 and 10 o'clock. The earlier hours of the morning are devoted to checking stock.
The McEacherns – who farm at Wingeel, west of Geelong – look at a bundle of papers on a Saturday but for Mr McEachern it is usually Stock and Land which he turns to first. From his usual Saturday morning reading chair, he says: ''It suits the stockman's ilk, it suits the breeders of livestock.''
Mr McEachern, 72, says he pays particular attention to the sheep, wool and beef news in Stock and Land, as well as the livestock prices and information on which districts have received rainfall is crucial practical information. ''The map of where the weather is fantastic,'' he says. ''There's an outlet for livestock somewhere if it does rain somewhere.''
After reading Stock and Land, Mr McEachern turns to the paper's city stablemate, The Age. He says his family has been reading Stock and Land since at least the 1940s.
More than 200 kilometres to the east of the McEacherns' large wool and beef property, Faye Tuchtan and her husband Graham Wood are beef producers at Grantville. ''We like the Stock and Land because it's a paper for the more serious farmer,'' Mrs Tuchtan says.
She says it takes her and her husband a week to read the whole paper, which is published every Thursday. The couple are subscribers and the paper arrives in the farm letter box every Thursday morning. ''He usually takes it first,'' she says with a laugh.
''I read it from cover to cover (but) I don't look at the hay and grain report,'' she says. ''But I do read the rest, I like the fact that it gives the VFF (Victorian Farmers Federation) space. I always read that.''
The first edition of Stock and Land was published on July 1, 1914, less than four weeks before the outbreak of World War I. It sold for ''one halfpenny per copy".
Its first front page reported that 20,815 fat sheep were yarded at the previous day's sheep sales. The ''Melbourne Market Reports'' said: ''The market for bullocks opened brisk at fully equal to last week's best rates. As sales progressed competition improved.'' It also revealed that W. Whitehead, from ''The Lighthouse'', Upper Murray, sold 172 bullocks.
Stock and Land will celebrate its centenary landmark with a dinner at the Melbourne Showgrounds on Friday July 4. An 84-page special centenary publication will be available at the dinner and with the edition published on July 10.
