Matthew Wengert & Louise Martin-Chew

This series of blogs traces the visual history of the Queensland Government Printing Office, documenting the significant graphic legacy of this institution (the designs), the narratives and publications of this place (details), and the stories of the people who worked there (devils).

It is impossible to overstate the importance of printing, which revolutionised how information was created, shared and preserved, and changed the cultural, religious and scientific shape of humanity.

Devils

Many hundreds of people worked in the Printing Offices’ different sections over 151 years. In this blog we introduce some of the Government Printers who led the organisation – the ‘devils’.  The stone gargoyles above the heritage-listed George Street facade also represent the workers, styled as devils – ‘an old industry term for the youngest apprentices. These industrious Devils came to create Designs and informative Details on behalf of the people and State – creating a visual history of Queensland through printing.

The work produced by the printing Office is directly and profoundly relevant to almost every part of Queensland and its history. From the borders to the beaches of Cape York and Torres Strait; from baby clinics and maternal health to burial regulations and mortality statistics; from the earliest years of the Colony to the Newman Government. This creative and productive output describes the Printing Office’s central role in documenting Queensland – and virtually every aspect of the Colony’s and then State’s relationship with its people.

Designs

Beautiful, elaborate decorative printing – the ‘Designs’ – included posters for the Government Intelligence & Tourist Bureau, invitations and menus for official functions (Royal Visits, parliamentary banquets and festive events etc.), and official artworks and illustrations for publications by all the different government departments and agencies – books, maps, charts, posters, pamphlets and signs. These myriad designs reflect creative peaks for graphic design and lithographic printing in the Victorian, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and Modernist eras. Even the more mundane printed products of the feature evolving graphic legacies from the changing aesthetic and technological developments over the 150-odd years of Printing Office’s work.

Details

In Queensland from 1862, the Government Printing Office published official documents and information from soon after the Queensland colony became self-governing in 1859. These publications are what we are calling the ‘Details’, and they included Hansard, parliamentary papers, annual reports, royal commissions, Acts & Bills & regulations and statutes, nautical charts and tide timetables, electoral maps (and hundreds of other types of maps), survey plans, railway timetables, and other regular and occasional publications. Banknotes, duty stamps, postage stamps, railway tickets, and School Readers were some of the printed material that Queenslanders used nearly every day. If a person was buying land or a car, driving a car, or getting married, they filled in forms that came off the machines in the buildings between George and William Streets.

From its beginnings a few years after the separation of Queensland, the Queensland Government Printing Office created enduring records – printed on quality papers with quality inks, preserved because they were official and inherently important. Its output grew steadily in quantity and significance.

Over a century and a half, printing processes were themselves radically transformed, so that the changing look and style of its work is also an illustrated history of printing itself. It depicts how the state was governed. Economics, elections, education & schools, health & hospitals, agriculture and mining, railways, roads and shipping, policing and prisons – all of these find historical expression through work printed by the Queensland Government Printing Office and are available for research at the Queensland State Archives.

Matthew Wengert & Louise Martin-Chew