Frederick Vosper

Frederick Charles Burleigh Vosper (23 March 1869 – 6 January 1901) was an Australian newspaper journalist and proprietor, and politician. He was well known for his ardent views and support of Australian republicanism, federalism and trade unionism.

The son of civil engineer Charles Watson Vosper, Frederic Vosper was born in St Dominick, Cornwall, United Kingdom, and educated at Truro. He immigrated to Bolivia at the age of 15. Few other details of his early life are available, but in 1885 he was at Devonport serving with the Royal Navy on the training ship Lion.

Early in 1886 Vosper immigrated to Australia, arriving in Maryborough, Queensland in the middle of the year. He worked as a timber miller, drover and miner, before taking a job as a journalist for the Eidsvold Reporter. He later became mining correspondent for Maryborough Chronicle and Colonist, before becoming sub-editor for the Northern Miner in Charters Towers. According to Jaggard (1979), Vosper was heavily influenced by the political opinions and journalistic style of the Northern Miner's owner and editor, Thadeus O'Kane. When O'Kane died in May 1890, Vosper became editor of the Australian Republican, the organ of the Australian Republican Association.

Vosper rapidly developed a reputation as a political firebrand and industrial agitator with a talent for journalism and public speaking. During the 1891 Australian shearers' strike he wrote an editorial entitled Bread or Blood in which he encouraged the strikers to resort to violence if peaceful means provided unsuccessful: "If your oppressors will not listen to reason let them feel cold lead and steel; as they have starved you, so do you shoot them." As a result, Vosper was charged with two counts of seditious libel, but acquitted. The following year he was imprisoned for three months for inciting a riot during a miners' strike. At this time Vosper ceased cutting his hair. According to Victor Courtney, "the legend is that when in gaol he received the usual prison crop and he vowed that he would never have his hair cut again."

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