Printing in Australia arrived with the First Fleet in 1788 when the British began to colonize the Australian continent. On board was an old wooden hand printing press and some miscellaneous type. A printer was found later. Printing then was still very much like the printing in the days of Gutenberg. Imagine you are going to establish a prison in a place so remote and terrifying that it must have seemed to them very much how we would see establishing a prison colony on Mars. What would such a settlement require? Food, medicine, clothing. And a printing press?!
Printing must have seemed an essential foundation for the good order and success of such a colony. Indispensable to a civil and ordered society. And while Australian printing history doesn’t have the length and the breadth of printing in Germany, the UK or even the US, printing in Australia is no less interesting as it is the history of the establishment, the development and growth, of printing in a remote colonial outpost. To the modern high-tech industry, it has become.
Quite a lot of books and articles have been written about Australian printing history: the history of our printing, paper and type industries. Many of these works have been produced by small publishers or by the industry itself in small editions and so are hard if not impossible to find today. The list would be a very long one—even longer if you include all of the trade literature.
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