'[3] Norton was on hand on 24 June 1905 when the first copies of the 'Maoriland' edition rolled off the presses in Luke's Lane, an alley that still runs at right angles to Wellington's Courtenay Place.
[citation needed] In 1951, Norton sold out to a New Zealand consortium led by the paper's legal representative James Dunn and his former Scots College schoolmate Cliff Plimmer.
Over the next few decades, the New Zealand owners would refashion NZ Truth into what Yska calls 'a shrill megaphone for a conservative establishment holding back political, social and cultural ties that increasingly threatened to sweep it away.
In 1958, a Labour government passed a law restricting coverage to the bare bones of proceedings, removing a vital part of Truth's editorial 'bread and butter'.
[8] In 1963, as revelations of a seamy British political scandal unfolded, audited circulation reached a peak of 240,000, and the weekly claimed a readership of a million Kiwis.
But the advent of television in 1960, the decriminalisation of Sunday newspapers in 1963 and changing attitudes to sexual morality associated with the 'Swinging Sixties' were already shaking apart NZ Truth's world.