Illawarra Mercury
newspaper in Wollongong, Australia
The Illawarra Mercury is a daily newspaper serving the Illawarra region of New South Wales, Australia. It has been published since 1855, making it one of Australia's oldest newspapers and the second-oldest regional newspaper in New South Wales. It has been published daily since December 1949, and has had no local daily competition since the 1960s. It has strong links to the Illawarra community.
Under editor Peter Cullen, the Mercury was jocularly known as The Mockery among Illawarra residents for its poor copy editing, resulting in frequent typographical errors. As a result, it became a running gag on the ABC's Media Watch in the period when Stuart Littlemore hosted the programme. The Mercury is published in the standard Australian tabloid format, with each page having an approximate size of A3.
The Mercury has had several Walkley Award winners on staff, most recently journalists Mario Christodoulou (2008), Nicole Hasham and Laurel-Lee Roderick (2010), and photographer Sylvia Liber (2014).
The paper has often supported Labor at state and federal elections, but backed the Liberal Party for the 2011 New South Wales state election. It has links to neither party.
The public source identifies “Illawarra Mercury” as newspaper in Wollongong, Australia. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Illawarra, Mercury and newspaper.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q5998827. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1855, 1949, 2008 and 2010.
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This entry incorporates text from “Illawarra Mercury” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.