Samela Harris an arts critic among ground-breaking ventures as a hall-of-fame journalist in South Australia
Besides her performing arts focus, Samela Harris continued to break new ground in a range of other aspects from being the first female Australian-rules football columnist to a pioneering writer anticipating the impact of the internet.
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Samela Harris, with a ground-breaking career as journalist, critic, columnist, author, and blogger contributing to South Australian cultural and public life, was awarded the South Australia Media lifetime achievement award and inducted into the South Australian journalists’ hall of fame in 2017.
Born in 1946 in Adelaide to the poet and bookseller Max Harris and actor/dancer Yvonne Harris, Harris graduated from Presbyterian Girls College in 1963 and enrolled at Adelaide University law school. She was elected editor the university's student newspaper On Dit, leading to a Murdoch scholarship in 1964.
Soon after, she entered professional journalism as the first female general news reporter on Rupert Murdoch’s Adelaide afternoon tabloid The News. In 1969, Harris left Australia to work as a United Kingdom correspondent for AAP Reuter on Fleet Street, before gaining a job as a first female general reporter for the Edinburgh Evening News in Scotland, then as United Kingdom correspondent for Australia’s national paper The Australian.
Back in Adelaide in 1985, she started 28 years at The Advertiser newspaper. The principal focus of Harris’s work at The Advertiser was Adelaide’s performing arts scene as she rose to arts editor and a principal theatre critic and commentator. But Harris continued to break new ground in a range of other aspects, from being the first female Australian-rules football columnist to a pioneering writer anticipating the impact of the internet and becoming The Advertiser’s first online editor. Her cooking column “On A Shoestring – Recipes from a Housing of Raising Sons” was compiled and published as a 2009 Wakefield Press book.
Harris was elected by her fellow critics to the first chair of the Adelaide Critics Circle in 1997. After retiring from The Advertiser in 2013, she continued as a critic and advocate as a regular contributor to the Barefoot Review, Adelaide independent online news site InDaily and Peter Goers’ ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Adelaide radio Smart Arts programme.
Harris also was active as Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance journalists South Australia president, convenor of women in Media South Australia and chair of the South Australian media awards. She maintained blogs angrypenguin, satreblog and ernmalley, a collection of documents related to the Ern Malley poetry hoax that notoriously targeted her father Max in the 1940s.