1/1, September 1870-October 1954.

Sixpence a copy, 2s. 6d.-6s. a year, 8-20 pp.

Terry (1836-1913) was free-thinking Unitarian and reformer and something of a utopian socialist and this journal became a virtual clearinghouse for progressive heterodoxy at the antipodes. "The object of this Journal is purely progressive. lt is intended to act as a vehicle for all subjects which are the outgrowth of natural thought and intuitive reason, and calculated to enlarge our perceptions of nature and appreciation of the Divine Laws which regulate all her operations." Terry was English and came to Australia in 1853 where he took part in his father's successful drapery business until the late 1860s. He had become a spiritualist in about 1858 and in 1869 both he and his father discovered their talents as trance mediums and he set up as a magnetic healer, clairvoyant, herbalist and chemist in Melbourne, eventually doing business as W.H. Terry's Spiritual and Reform Book Depot on Russel Street. He began working as a medium in 1869 and began this journal (under "direct spiritual injunction") the next year, editing it until he resigned in 1905, though he had transferred his interest in the journal to his nephew Charles H. Bamford in 1887. The journal effectively supplanted the Glowworm, the first Australian spiritualist journal, founded in 1869. Terry was a participant from a distance in most of the controversies within spiritualism and Theosophy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Annie Bright (1840-1913) was editor from 1905-1913 and wrote much of the journal herself under the guidance of her spiritual helpers. After the death of W.T. Stead on the Titanic in 1912 (see the note under Borderland) she wrote a volume on the spiritual world under his inspiration. See the note under Cosmos. In the 1920s, W. Britton Harvey edited and published the journal.

The majority of IAPSOP's current run of The Harbinger of Light was painstakingly digitized by a single individual, in New Zealand, who continues to work on preserving this Tier 1 Spiritualist journal, and has asked for credit to be withheld until she completes her work.