FROM THE ARCHIVES:
In two weeks, we’ll mark three decades since the very first hard-copy issue of Australia’s longest non-continuous-running and by far the least profitable satire and humour newspaper hit the streets of Brisbane.
The issue came out virtually on the eve of the 1989 Queensland state election on December 2 that brought Wayne Goss’s Labor to power and ended more than 30 years of conservative power.
Day by day over coming weeks we’ll highlight some of the most talked-about editions, the ones people found most offensive or legally actionable, in the almost 20 years of The Bug‘s original hardcopy life.
We’ll end with the original issue – you’ll discover we held out very little hope that Labor in 1989 would finally win – but leading up to that we’ll grab front pages and major stories at random so you can all marvel at the absolute stupidity of those behind The Bug, a couple of clowns who love writing but could never really be bothered about trying to make a quid out of it in the process.
Tomorrow: The month in 1992 when The Bug went trapezoid, a daring world-first in newspaper publishing.