It was refreshing to visit the Beenleigh Historic Village the other day with my daughter, who insisted that I took her for a return visit after a school outing around a year ago.
They were particularly enthusiastic about the old-style print shop, where printing and typesetting machines from the past, all in working order, are on display.
The place is staffed by volunteers, tradesmen from a bygone era, who showed us how type used to be set, one letter at a time into lines then put together into pages ready for printing.
In the late 1800s, a German watchmaker invented the Linotype machine which has 3000 parts and can, as the name suggests, sets one line at a time.
That machine can set type in sizes ranging from one-twelfth of an inch to half an inch in height.
I was fascinated by its keyboard, which has 90 keys – 30 for lower case, 30 for capitals and 30 for punctuation marks, numbers, symbols and various-sized spaces.
Another machine, I think it was called a Ludlow, worked by putting brass matrices with sizes as large as an inch into a hand-held device which went into a machine which used hot lead to form a line.
On the printing side of the shed was a machine, which previously lived at the Norco factory in Byron Bay.
It was powered by the operator pedalling with one leg and can print A4-sized pages in one colour.
Next was a similar machine called a Heidelberg platen, powered by electricity, which could also print A4 pages in one colour, but much faster than the pedal-operated model.
There were two more machines that were able to print much larger sheets as well as a hand-operated large guillotine that was used to cut large sheets of paper to size.
I spent an hour there and learnt plenty about how things used to be done in the printing trade, a far cry from pressing a key on a computer keyboard in order to print full colour pages.
I was thrilled when a bloke by the name of Chris set my name in lead in half-inch type, but I he wouldn’t let me take it away thanks to today’s health and safety rules.
The only downside to the visit was having to walk what seemed like miles to a toilet, apparently because the people at the café didn’t clean their grease trap, instead putting oil down the drain, which clogged up the main toilet system making it unusable.
Apart from that glitch it was a great visit and one that I would heartily recommend.
Johannes Caxton, Tanah Merah.
