STAN MAHONEY cuts his teeth on some honest outback journalism – and asks what the world will look like without it

By 2011, if the Governor of California has his way, roughly 90 percent of all state schoolchildren will learn from electronic textbooks – portable devices not unlike watered-down iPhones. Similar plans have been mooted in New York, Britain and Japan; in theory at least, the heavily bound textbooks 
that so malformed our tender highschool spines will be, inside a generation, obsolete.

Greg Ghiggioli, kind-faced cattle farmer-come-offset printer, talks of the demise of his chosen industry – our chosen industry – with amazing flippancy. Where we are, on the main street of a dustbowl farming outpost in New South Wales, it’s possible for the life and death of an industry to be spoken of in the same laconic tone that delicate urbanites like you and I reserve for Michael Jackson, or Lady Gaga’s genitals, or two-for-one cocktails at Shotz.

Where we are, it hasn’t rained properly in ten years. Which is how come, less than a year ago, the Ghiggioli family bought a newspaper and a print shop, which is how come, after their petulant graphic designer disappeared into the Hunter Valley, I’m here on a two week scab contract. My job is to keep the newspaper on time, the print shop ticking over, and while I’m at it, somehow turn a family of cattle farmers into a family of graphic designers.

Instead, I’m much more interested in slacking off with the boss’ husband Greg. Together with his grown nephew Ben, we lean against heavy machinery, smoke, drink out of cans, bail the occasional stack of newspapers and discuss the subtleties of women, drought and the future of the printing industry.

If it wasn’t for the lack of marijuana and Joy Division and available women and mobile phone reception and decent mustard, I could see myself getting used to this.

“Say every kid in California needs five textbooks a year. Multiply that by six years of high school, times however 
many kids there are in California. That’s a lot of printing.” 
Greg takes another thoughtful sip of Bundy and coke. “Books are heavy and expensive. Pretty soon most people will be reading books on these hand-held things, and not just in the first world either – everywhere.” He glances at the huge collating machine taking up almost half the shop. The thing was made – built – some time in the seventies, imported 
from Belgium, capable of collating, folding and stapling around 300 standard newspapers a minute.

Greg is at least as fond of this ingenious behemoth as he is of his twenty-year-old aluminium photographic plate maker. Which says nothing of the Hamada 660 offset press, which is somehow faster and more reliable than the two electronic duplo printers less than half its age. Faster, even, than the state-of-the-art digital printer, expensive as sin, yet still 
prone to the same paper jams as the $30 piece of junk 
that came free with your laptop.  There’s a pattern here.

He reserves a special affection for his vintage 1930s Heidelberg windmill press, all cast iron and pistons and flailing arms, which he still uses for adding perforations 
to calendars and invoice books. Operating it, he looks like a sort of outback Geppetto – bifocals, gnarled hands, a wreath of grey wispy hair around a sun-ravaged pate. I watch him wrestle with various machines while I pump out mediocre business cards and order books. He belongs outside in the sunshine with his arm in a cow, yet he seems pretty okay with where he is. Every day presents some new technical problem for him to solve, many of them with some eerie agricultural corollary. The task of collating an edition of the Dunedoo Diary, for example, seemed to involve the kind of machinery and hand-eye co-ordination akin to those needed for an annual sheep dip (at least as far as I can gather from the sheep dipping I’ve seen on TV).

Later I would learn that the ageing duplo printers functioned better when the air around them was still. Greg swore that if you walked past them at pace (which often happens on deadline), their delicate rhythm would somehow stutter, causing a paper jam, or a missed sheet.

Printing is often a kind of alchemy, fraught with intuition, frustration and secret knowledge. Even things like barometric pressure seem to affect the reliability of some of the machines; the way the ink adheres to the page; the rate at which it dries, ready to be collated and stapled. Sometimes, early on a print day, Greg shuts everything down and waits till the morning dew has settled.

There’s something, well, wholesome about that.

Greg’s wife Natalie runs much of the operation. She’s a loud, impulsive, hard drinking matriarch with whom the wise do not fuck. She hates that her regular graphic designer – currently fled to the Hunter Valley – thinks she can show up whenever she likes, on account of the fact that she’s the only person for a hundred miles who knows how to export a PDF.

So between invoice books and business cards I teach Natalie the rudiments of laying out her baby, The Coolah District Diary. It takes some time for me to pierce her glazed-over insistence that “computers” are beyond the natural ken of the hard working and middle aged. Now and then, when she thinks Greg is taking too much time on a job, she barks at him with a species of venom that would cause, in any other office, a tearful industrial dispute.

It’s slow going, but I know I can at least rely on Natalie’s determination to wrench some control over the one part of the operation that she can’t, in a pinch, bloody well do herself. You get the impression that Natalie hates relying 
on anyone but family – the idea of anyone taking a day 
off is appalling to her.

And yet everything about her seems tempered by a striking sense of community. Practical, hard headed – a million 
miles from the candied outback jingoism you see on TV. 
When I ask her if it’s fair for the receptionist to be 
selling advertising, she looks at me with a kind of pity. 
“It’s different out here, Stan. In a town like this, in the 
middle of fucking nowhere, everyone should know how 
to do everyone else’s job.” She gestures over to the nearby 
Coolah Ranges, already turning yellow for the summer. “I mean, if we all just did our own thing, we’d be fucked, wouldn’t we?”

The following Thursday, a freak storm tore half the roof off the shop. It peeled away like the lid of a giant sardine can, detached itself with a biblical wrenching sound,  then landed flat against the library across the main street.

Greg and I had been printing the first few sets of The Diary when it happened. For some reason the Duplos were printing the imposed PDFs with way too few dots per inch, no matter how high the quality of the exported file. The deadline was in just over 24 hours and I was dreading the possibility of manually imposing each set and printing from an older version of InDesign.

But then the roof blew away, and everything was amazing. We shut everything down, turned off the main switch and waited for the SES to show up with some sandbags and a tarp. One of the volunteers was the local auctioneer; another owned the supermarket across the street. A four-eyed kid showed up on a lowrider.

“What’s going on?”
“Roof came off.”
“Where’d it go?”
“Over there.”
“Cool.”

After a while the kid started to grate, so we gave him a camera and a notepad (the kind that Greg makes from scratch) and told him to go bother the SES. I took a nap in the storeroom until the power came back on. I was back at work about an hour and a half later.
 
The storm raged on, and the pages kept printing out of resolution. Every ten minutes there was a power surge, 
and the computers would reset. Greg said it was caused 
by lightning striking the substation in Dubbo, and there was no way of knowing when it would let up. Naturally he wanted to check on the farm and be with his family, but you wouldn’t guess from looking at him – the bastard looked for all the world like this was a normal Thursday evening, beset by a maelstrom of wind and thunder and obnoxious machines, playing solitaire while he waited for me to send through another set of pages.

* * *

It seems like the more the process of publishing moves away from hardware and towards the nebulous, intangible realm of software, the less romantic it gets. Gone are the days of moveable type, manually set on a cast iron plate by wizened old Gepettos, who probably looked like Greg, only German, and with syphilis and bad teeth. Gone too are the skills of aligning spot colours, or cropping articles with a metal ruler and a scalpel. Gone, or almost gone, is offset printing with photographic plates.

And so it is, or so it seems, that something as simple and beautiful as the printed word becomes more complicated, and, in a way, less real. If a generation of American schoolkids grow up without textbooks, if they get all their information, all their literature from touch screens and monitors and electronic ink, how soon before the rest of the world follows suit? How long before the magazine and the perfect-bound book become to the e-book what the candle is to the light bulb? And what would we have lost?

A country town is not the source of racism, nor old-fashioned misogyny, nor “climate change denial” that we so easily take it for. It’s more like an enclave for worthy things upon which we pallid metropolitan hipsters look down. Guns. Heavy Machinery. Patriotism. Cheap Beer. Honest Work. Offset Printing. I wonder if these things go to country towns to 
die, or merely hide away til it’s safe to come back. Either way 
I hope people like the Ghiggolis are amongst them, holding 
off against the drought and the isolation, drinking out of 
cans, waiting for the dew to settle.

Art by Robin Tatlow-Lord