And behind the scenes there was a war, quietly and ferociously going on, with roots going back two decades. It was a war for the hearts and minds of a people. This conflict was very specific. It was only conducted, publicly, on one day of the week. That day was Sunday. The people were Victorians.

It was truly another time. The internet tsunami was still over the horizon. Print reigned supreme. The rivers of gold from classified advertising were being used to irrigate the grand experiment.

In the weeks leading up to that afternoon and night, the new staff for The Sunday Age, hired from within and outside, plus the staff from the daily Age brought into help (such as this writer), worked out concept and design, placement and strategy. Dummy pages were printed off with a secrecy akin to that surrounding national security. Staff worked long, long hours, overtime was piled upon overtime, extra shifts were dispensed without a thought to budget.

The next day, Sunday, August 20, three newspapers launched themselves on Melbourne. They were The Sunday Age, Sunday Herald and Sunday Sun. Just in case anyone missed the point, they were Sunday papers.

There was no blood spilt, except metaphorically, no injuries, except to ego and reputation. There were huge craters in budgets where expenditure bombs exploded, amounting to millions of dollars. The phoney war of rumours, spying, of staff being snatched from one enterprise to another, of seeking to lock in advertisers, had been going on for several months.

From the distance of 30 years, the black-and-white grain of newspaper publications seems ancient and primitive. The Sunday Age, in declaring its presence through the use of colour pictures on the front page and in sport, especially, was groundbreaking. The enemy was not impressed. Sunday Herald editor Alan Farrelly sniffed dismissively that his paper was not television in print. He missed the point, and the boat. Colour was most assuredly the future. It did not, could not, exclude the writing and reporting. It was a piece of the whole.

Melburnians did not know this. What they did know was that on that Sunday, if they so desired, they could read three new newspapers. The city had three daily papers - The Age, The Herald and The Sun. But this was more than a ripple in the routine of the weekend. It shifted the locus in the reception of news and information, be it political, social, sport or entertainment. Readers no longer had to wait until Monday morning to know what happened on Saturday, for instance. Newsagents had to get used to delivering papers on a Sunday, in a city where the actual selling of papers on Sundays had been illegal.

Melbourne had been served with newspapers on Sunday, with the Sunday Press (a joint David Syme-Herald and Weekly Times collaboration) and the Sunday Observer. The Press had ceased publication a week before that August day, the Observer a few months earlier.

This was also a war of empires. Rupert Murdoch versus David Syme, a subsidiary of Fairfax. The prize was an ocean of advertising dollars. The Saturday issue of The Age was, at times, 300 pages. For a proprietor to capture the Sunday market was akin to a pincer movement against the enemy.