It took us about two days to produce 50 cards, working in groups of two or three. It took us that long and they didn’t turn out very well because we’d only been in our apprenticeships a few months.

About eight or nine years ago my mother found this box of cards and sent it over. It was quite amazing, looking at this card. It was printed with wooden blocks and nylos, and I took it to work and showed the guys. A couple of them said they remembered doing that at college, because there are a few New Zealand printers where I work. Now we can produce the same thing in a matter of minutes. It’s just an amazing difference. We had to put this through the press eight times – and wash the ink off and change colour eight times.

Multiple wash-ups. Now we just wash the ducts once a week. We run the PMS colours and run the varnish and the fifth colour in the last unit upstairs and away you go. If you do more than one wash-up a week people complain. We used to do many times a day.

We were using petra three-stage wash-up, which was a red, white and blue wash-up. The red dissolved the ink and got it off the press. The white was like a soap that washed the rollers. The blue dried all the grease out of the rollers to put the fresh ink on. They were carcinogens and we worked with it without gloves, all through the ‘80s. It was in the ’90s that we got rid of that stuff. We used to use another chemical called toluene. Inhale it and you’d go lightheaded while you were washing up. These days it’s all environmentally friendly and supposedly good for your health.

Clarke Bryant

Print’s Past excerpts 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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