Matthew Wengert & Louise Martin-Chew
The Queensland Government Printing Office was home to equipment found nowhere else in Queensland. While many printing businesses of varying scales operated in cities and towns across the state, the Printing Office did some unique work that required state-of-the-art – and high-cost – technology and machinery, as well as the highly skilled engineering workforce to keep it all operating effectively and efficiently.
Pictured above: Asset Registers 1875-1980, Queensland State Archives, ITM1691878
This unusual object – a mechanical book – has front and back covers of heavy-duty cardboard with integrated metal hinges and clasps that have two holes for the equivalent of nuts and bolts to hold them in place below and on top of the pages. It’s a binding system for books that can change and grow over time, as more pages are added or modified. The leather ‘covers’ with hand-tooled gilt lettering identify it as ‘INVENTORY – MACHINES AND ACCESSORIES – Government Printing Office’.
The leather shows not only great age, but long use and the sort of workaday handling common to everyday objects in an industrial setting. It’s scuffed and worn, but intact and strong. The pages are mostly bespoke printed forms, designed by printing office staff for the printing office’s unusual requirements, prepared to be used as needed – that day, the next week, or many years later. Different departments’ titles printed on various pages suggest the diverse work done by the Printing Office: Engineer, Despatch, Binders, Lithographic, Letterpress, Composing (not musical), Linotype and Monotype, Ruling and Envelope, and Railway Ticket.
Mechanical books are constructed in a way that allows them to be partially dismantled, such that pages can be removed and then replaced, or added as may be necessary. In the case of the Printing Office’s Asset Registers, each page documents a specific piece of equipment with typed or handwritten notes that detail when it was acquired, how much it cost, what maintenance or repairs have taken place, and other information. The assets recorded are as diverse as delivery vehicles, to specialist printing machines, and evoke an era when things were built to last.
The pages documenting the ‘RULING MACHINE(s)’ were, of course, printed by those very same machines. A ‘CUTTING MACHINE (38 inch)’ imported from England in 1894 for £120 was still in service more than 60 years later. The ‘WATERLOW TICKET PRINTING MACHINE’ – for printing railway tickets – that cost £125 in 1875 worked for 90 years before it required any significant maintenance: a new set of ‘Flat Springs’ for the outlay of £4 in 1965. A second ticket printing machine was added in 1884, another two machines (double-sided and single-sided) in 1912, and one more in 1944. Together they printed umpteen millions of tickets. To keep track of those railway – and other – tickets the Printing Office needed to make their own books for the purpose.
This large book is another bespoke volume made by the Printing Office for recording the work it produced. Each page lists the vast number of ticket batches printed on any day – and most days – for the Railway Department. The first page begins with October 1885, noting the total numbers of tickets printed during October (179,658) and November (227,650).
Later volumes detail the steady growth of ticket printing, reflecting changes in Queensland’s economy and population. In 1907 the Printing Office printed more than 4 million tickets and by 1910 more than 5 million. Through the 1940s to the1950s the Printing Office was routinely producing more than a million tickets per month. By the late 1960s it was unusual if it printed fewer than 10,000 tickets per day. The printing presses produced 93,350 tickets on 24 May 1968.
Pictured above: Examples from ‘Booklets, Cards, Casket Tickets, Invitations, Menus, Programs, Royal memorabilia, Tickets, Trip itineraries and War memorabilia, Silk invitations, menus and programs’ in Queensland State Archives ITM1692074.
These collections are small-format printed objects that the Printing Office probably kept as mementoes of its own history and as samples of the quality design and production work that it was capable of. Some of the objects are exquisite, others quirky. Many feature devil motifs and references to ‘The Devils’ – an adopted industry term for young apprentices. These ephemeral works include invitations and itineraries for staff excursions, such as picnics, bus trips, river trips, days out, ‘Smoko Concerts’, and ‘Wayzgooses’. The graphic adornments are usually comical, featuring ink-stained and overworked characters and proudly acknowledged as ‘Printed by Ourselves for Ourselves’.
The Printing Office was also responsible for designing and producing the Casket tickets, included in this collection, that helped to fund Queensland’s public hospitals, the betting tickets that coursed through the racing industry, and the ration tickets that regulated the war-time consumer economy.
Apart from revealing glimpses of early 20th century recreations, sports, and regional tourism destinations, there are numerous menus for state and civic dinners and luncheons, along with occasional advertisements for local firms. Ranging from the 1910s to the 1960s, these collections showcase a history of evolving design and graphic trends being put to use for special occasions such as Royal Visits and other parliamentary and state events, including the ‘Official Souvenir Programme of Celebrations in the City of Brisbane’ for the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (1937), the Centenary of Queensland (1959), various Anzac Day ceremonies, and Christmas greetings from premiers and ministers. Some items were printed on silk or fine linen. Examples include elaborate and ornately designed invitations to events held by the Brisbane Caledonian Society and the Queensland Irish Association.
This is a simple pamphlet consisting of around a dozen pages, stapled along the spine, which was issued during the epidemic of ‘Pneumonic Influenza’ (Spanish Flu) in May–June 1919. Tens of thousands were quickly printed and sent to local governments across Queensland and distributed for free.
This slim recipe booklet was prepared by Amy Schauer, who taught cooking classes at the Central Technical College in Brisbane, and who later wrote several cookery bestsellers. It was published by the Department of Public Instruction, ‘Approved by the Department of Public Health’. The recipes included such delights as Chicken Broth, Stewed Tripe, Stewed Mutton Chop, Sago Pudding, and the classic Beef Tea made by the long process. This was bland cuisine on an epically boring scale – but it was medically measured into three stages (‘First Stage, when the temperature of the patient is over 102 degrees’, etc.). There are actual recipes for both ‘Bread and Butter’ and ‘Mashed Potatoes’. The design of the booklet was as bland as the recipes within it. During this unprecedented health emergency there was no time for making it more visually enticing, and the food was probably better left unseen until it needed to be cooked for someone at death’s door.
The Printing Office was hard pressed through the emergency period of the ‘Pnu-Flu’, with a large part of the staff absent through severe illness, while a cascade of epidemic-specific printing needed to be done. These new jobs included public health proclamations and regulations – for example, new rules about cleaning crockery and glasses in cafés, or forbidding spitting in public, or sealing corpses of flu victims in lead-lined coffins to permit transport by railway – with a corresponding flood of Government Gazette notices. The other unique printing job was both simple and effective:
Only three letters on one side, four on the other, in plain bold font – and it helped save hundreds of lives. The ‘SOS / FOOD’ placard was distributed to forty thousand households in Brisbane, as well as homes in smaller cities including Ipswich, Maryborough, Rockhampton, Roma, Toowoomba, and Townsville. If the ‘FOOD’ side was displayed through a window, it meant the occupants needed a meal left at the door but didn’t want to be in contact with anyone outside. The other side was a visual call for help, meaning someone in the house needed urgent medical assistance.[1]
Research has not yet found one of these placards, but there are historical photographs that show them to be roughly equivalent in size to A3 paper. With COVID-19 still a recent memory, this institutional response to a similar health emergency 100 years prior is poignant.
References:
[1] Matthew Wengert, ‘Rare photos from the 1919 Influenza epidemic in Queensland’, State Library of Queensland, published 9 April 2020.
