Look at this photo. It seems as if it was taken in the 1940s. The dirty overalls. The dark, confined space. Take the newspapers out of it and you could be looking at a bunch of World War II submariners.

Subscribe now for unlimited access.

Login or signup to continue reading

It's one we love in our newsroom for the raw, industrial feel - an inky reminder of our past.

In truth the picture is far more recent than it looks. It was taken in 1996, and these printers are holding up the last edition printed before the installation of the "new" press and giant press hall at Fyshwick (both now consigned to history too).

I arrived on the scene four years later, so this image looks almost as foreign to me as it would to a trainee starting today - even if a couple of those faces have a certain fleeting familiarity. The kind you have for a colleague who shares the same car park but whose job and working hours are completely different to yours.

The press that was running by the time I arrived was a German behemoth, the Manroland Geoman, that produced colour pages in the tens of thousands per hour with an almost surgical cleanliness.

Unlike that 1960s-era press, which was in Fyshwick long before the newsroom moved there, the ink stayed where it was meant to and our printers went home almost as clean as they arrived in the morning.

It's the nature of most of our........

© Canberra Times