According to the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, Lane received his award “For service to the printing industry, particularly the integration of information technology into conventional print technologies, and to the community”.
Lane told Australian Printer in an exclusive interview just hours after the honour had been announced that he was taken somewhat by surprise by it. He felt that it would have had quite a lot to do with his work with bodies such as the Printing & Allied Trades Employers’ Federation (PATEFA) and its successor, Printing Industries Association of Australia (PIAA).
Lane has been active in the printing community over many years and has served at both state and federal levels on print’s peak body. A former state and national president of PIAA, he chairs the body’s employer relations committee and serves on the PacPrint Board and the National Printing Industry Training Council (NPITC).
Internationally, Lane is co-chairman of the 8th World Print and Communications Forum which will take place next January in Cape Town, South Africa. Lane was also the chairman of the 7th World Print and Communications Forum which took place in Beijing, China during 2001. This was the last major world event held in China before it successfully bid to host the Olympics in 2008.
The World Print and Communications Forum is a conference of top printing and publishing executives from throughout the world and is held every four years to take the pulse of the printing and communications industry and to chart a course for the future.
Apart from his public activities in the promotion of print and its well being, Lane heads up the family business, which employs nearly 100 people at its offset and digital printing facilities in Adelaide and Canberra. The company also has a sales office in Sydney.
Lane started out in the printing industry 39 years ago when, at age 17, he was employed by the Adelaide Advertiser. He recalls that he was lucky enough to be seconded to the Advertiser’s computer subsidiary, Computer Graphics Corporation (CGC), which was then responsible for compilation of most of Australia’s telephone directories. After extensive training, Lane qualified as a software analyst and programmer.
This was before the advent of the Apple Macintosh and computers in print were then in their early days but it was this break that grounded Lane well for a digital future in the graphic arts industry. In 1971, while still with CGC, Lane helped his elder brother to take over a small printing firm, DG & B Paul Pty Ltd.
In 1978, an opportunity arose for the Lanes’ business to get the contract for printing South Australia’s race books. This required considerable computer knowledge and was the deciding factor in Peter Lane leaving the Advertiser and taking over the management of the family print business.
Crucially, this was during the industry’ transition from hot metal to offset and for the first time, information for the race books was to be transmitted over telephone lines from Melbourne to Adelaide. The fledgling Racing Services Bureau had been set up to computerise the racing industry’s data but whilst they could feed the information into the system, they hadn’t yet worked out how to extract it.
With his computer skills, Lane was able to help the Bureau at its time of need and in return, his company got the lucrative printing contract for the state’s race books. The rest, as they say, is history.
The Lane family is proud of its commitment to people. It kept on as many of the staff of the business it acquired as possible. The company accountant from the DG & B Paul days, for example, is in his 80s – and still advising Lane Print Group. The company also gained new hands and skills when, after the Herald & Weekly Times takeover of the Advertiser Group, the CGC business was closed and staff who would otherwise have been made redundant were welcomed at the growing Lane business.
With the closure of the CGC business, the Advertiser had no more need of its Xerox laser printing machines either and these were happily taken over by Lane and became the foundation of the company’s expanding digital printing business. “And the company still has an involvement with racing today”, Peter Lane told Australian Printer.
The Lane Print Group has had more of a digital background than most printing companies and this should place it well as printing technology continues to digitise. However, Peter Lane is not just using his and his company’s computer skills in print. As part of an international aid initiative funded by the South Australian government and the provincial government of West Java in Indonesia, Lane has been working to establish a modern water management system in the provincial capital, Bandung.
“This region is home to 35 million Indonesians who produce 60 per cent of Indonesia’s GDP, so as you can imagine, their water management needs are immense”, Lane explained.
When he isn’t overseeing the Lane Group’s printing operations or its developing water management business in Indonesia, or attending to his official duties at PIAA, or on the PacPrint or NPITC boards, or being a print ambassador for Australia, Peter Lane unwinds with a game of golf or at the gym. He’s also a devoted AFL fan and Adelaide Crows supporter.
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