This fellow called Pooker Hilderson – I don’t know why we called him Pooker – used to take all the ink off, clean the blocks with petrol and put them down nicely beside the machine.

One day we were doing the Western Star, which was a Roma paper that we used to print there. Of course we were running late again, because we had to catch the train with the papers on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Pooker put the blocks on, but he put one of them on upside down. So instead of it having a lady’s face, it was black, six by four, just pure black. This was a front-page block of course!

The page came out on the press with a ruddy big black square on the front. Pooker said, you can’t reuse that block. We’ll have to make more blocks because the pressure will have taken the image off the other side. We couldn’t run it through again.

So a fellow called John Higgins, who was the editor, said: “We’re going to have fun with this. Get the plates off the machine and chip and chisel out a big question mark.”

About 50 pages had been printed, so we threw them away. Then we ran the newspaper with a big question mark on the front page. In the following week’s paper, the editor ran a competition to see if the readers could guess what the story had been. So we got out of it that way.

Mick Grayson

Print’s Past excepts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of  Printing, and are due to be published in a forthcoming book.

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