The early Sydney Bulletin, 'a parade of expressive tricks and marvels', came out of the vociferous clamour that was the late nineteenth-century press—British radical weeklies, battling American dailies, lively news sheets from bush towns and goldfields.

Turning up every week in its violent pink cover—'half Australia writes it', they said, 'all Australia reads it'—the Bulletin was the Great Print Circus: 'a better book' said one of its veterans 'than any of the books that came out of it'.

In this remarkable study of the Bulletin and its founding editor , J. F. Archibald, Sylvia Lawson provides a provocative re-interpretation of the legendary 1880s and 1890s, looking at the dark side of the circus as well as its high entertainment.