A Wharfedale goes up the wall, pasta and flatbed rotaries, and the day the news got f**t, as Peter Coleman wraps it up
Researching the Cossar history which appears in page 30 was a time-consuming but amazing journey, coloured by numerous anecdotes. Steve Carle – who worked at his family’s Bush Telegraph from the age of ten – told me of the days when the newspaper was printed on a Quad Crown Wharfedale until an accident befell it: Dressing the belt from a wall-mounted shaft had the effect of glueing it to the pulley, so that when the shaft started turning, the old flatbed press was winched up towards it.
Their Cossars were used until the mid 1980s, some pages printed from photopolymer plates originated using equipment modified from an old flong oven and a washing machine.
Some nostalgia here: I’m old enough, incidentally, to (just) remember the gas-driven Wharfedale which was “back-up” to the L&M Centurette which printed the Kent, UK, newspaper my parents bought when I was four.
As it would, the feature took way more time than was planned, and even as we go to press, there are still loose ends. And given my background, I was surprised that we were the ones tracking their history: Were there two installations in Canterbury, for example (one mentioned by MediaSpectrum’s David Page); what happened to the Dean Forest Mercury one, obviously valued enough to be the subject of a video?
I’m sure we shall hear more. I hope so.
In Darwin for Australian SWUG honorary member Bill Kemp – who at 84, is only a year older than the crocodile we pictured at the time – told me he was much more familiar with the Cossar’s arch-rival, the Swiss Duplex.
Again, installations – including some in Queensland – ran until they were displaced by Community and V15A offset presses.
Which, incidentally, is how I got into all this. Jean Claude Pautrat, my host at Goss in Shanghai in March, had started his career with French press maker Marinoni, which has a claim to being the first rotary press maker, and built single-width offset presses until being merged into Harris Web.
It would be good to hear now from afficionados of the Duplex – built by a company which made pasta-making equipment – after a pause to catch my breath, please.
It’s strange to think that some of those old Cossars were still running when the first of Rupert Murdoch’s manroland Newsman presses went in. In Murarrie in Queensland last month, I toured the 1995 presses which are still there.
Except that in a sense, they’re not. The heavy metal and blue cabinetry is still in evidence, but all the electronics which controls the presses has gone, replaced with brand new systems, plus some more which takes over the thousands of adjustments which the lot of a typical press operator... if he (or she) will let it.
Yes, or she: Nicole Clarke, who helps run the News Corp Australia presses at Chullora in Sydney was prominent at SWUG. Hard to miss, in fact with the orange hair, and it was good to consider the extent to which her time with News has empowered her.
In an industry segment still dominated by men, more women would be welcome... the only problem being that there is little enough recruitment of any sort.
I brought back after last year’s Ifra Expo, a copy of the UK Daily Telegraph my sister had carefully kept for me, a page of its sports section filled with dummy headlines and placeholder text.
Nothing, however, to compare with the edition of the Australian Financial Review issued to WA readers in late April. The collectors’ item product of pushbutton publishing has developed a life of its own, including now-famous #worldisfukt hashtag.
A talking point at SWUG of course, where some printers were heard to mutter that they “weren’t proofreaders”.
All of which leads to the point which is the cause of the industry’s despair: “People don’t read newspapers any more.” Perhaps they should.