It was 11.30 one night in March, 1969. The Age, always restless and energetic in the evening, had finally been put to bed, as we say in the trade.
Twenty-five minutes beforehand the last headline, writ large in biro on a yellowing piece of copy paper, had been placed in a canister and dispatched by tube to the composing room two floors below where the words were set in hot metal -- a cocktail of lead and zinc etc.
The headline, `Greg Chappell not picked for tour', would not have wowed Joseph Pulitzer but it fitted and almost met the deadline.
As usual, the composing room at 233 Collins Street , home of The Age for 90 years _ across the tram lines from the Hotel Australia _ resembled the engine room of an old ocean liner with its associated noises. Pavarotti would have been rendered voiceless. Called ``the stone'', the composing room was a melodrama of diverse characters _ compositors and fellow printing staff _ many of them sober fellows, others with a passion for getting the job done before the beer over-thawed. Readers corrected proofs. Journos joined the fray to cut stories or rearrange them. Touching metal unleashed the wrath of the head printer. Sub-editors sometimes made a dash upstairs when nasty little holes appeared in a page.
``We can't fill the journal,'' a foreign editor announced sternly to his small band of subs late one evening, having discovered four vacant spaces on the foreign page. ``Don't read it, sub it,'' he snarled, handing out six ``fillers'' that had suddenly become newsworthy.
Moments of great crisis on the stone, such as a spilled galley of type, evinced strong language in a male-only environment. Once restored, the type was housed in a chase, an iron frame the size of the page. The frame sat on a stone-topped trolley. When the page was locked up, phase one on the way to the presses and the newsstand was complete.
The guns of the composing room were the linotype operators, a battery of good blokes skilled at belting out slugs of metal from edited copy faster than a speeding bullet, so to speak. Between editions, they took time out for steadying tipples and target practice. The targets the odd, well-fed rats that scurried across the exposed beams in a room old and weary after a near century of big stories, and toil and devotion to the cause of the Fourth Estate. The missiles were big slugs of metal. Direct hits brought roars of approval. When struck, the rats who ate Pied Piper's for lunch at the nearby Graham Hotel barely changed stride, scoffing at near misses in 50 different sharps and flats.
Collins Street had been the home of The Age since 1879. The first two offices, from the launch of the paper in 1854, had been in Elizabeth Street _ one modest, the second a ramshackle building.
Originally, the Collins Street office was rented for 500 pounds a year, the premises shared with a fancy-goods dealer, an engraver, an architect, and a tailor. But it was soon deemed inadequate. In 1884, the site was bought for 16,300 pounds. The building was demolished, making way for a commodious five-storey Victorian edifice with a brilliant facade that towered over neighboring structures in one of the busiest thoroughfares of the city, down a bit from Swanston Street . The cost of the new building and printing plant was 20,000 pounds. Atop, in time, sat a statue of Mercury, the Roman God of Commerce, who expressed delight at the spiraling circulation. The building served The Age well and was a Collins Street landmark. But by 1969, after several refurbishments, it was too small for a mushrooming paper, a Melbourne tradition in the world's top 10 papers.
Almost everyone seemed to smoke at Collins Street . Almost. In the 1950s, the burly, jovial pictorial editor, Greg Stephens, favored Churchillian cigars. His pokey office on the second floor, overlooked Collins Street . One afternoon while puffing away happily, the phone rang. ``Mr Stephens'' said a shrill voice, ``You're smoking. Please put it out.'' ``Certainly Miss Syme,'' he said, startled. ``Where are you?'' ``I'm over the road having my hair done. I can see you through the window.'' Miss Kathleen Syme, a newspaperwoman of much clout, was a grand-daughter of David Syme, who made the paper famous.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the sardine tin that doubled as a sub-editors' room on that March night in 1969, it was time for a breather at 11.30 before launching into the second edition. Cast aside for the moment were the tools of the trade -- portable Remington and Olivetti typewriters, biros, pencils, pot of clag or glue and well-tried Gillette razor blades. The last items were fundamental in the processing of overseas news, which for years had spewed out of clattering teleprinters by the inch or the yard, depending on the gravity of the situation. Bells rang when it was stumps at Lord's or General Douglas MacArthur told Harry Truman he intended to bomb China.
No sooner had the assembly of subs reached for a cold Thala Dan (can) of VB, than a voice rang out across the room. `` Austin ! Want to see the new office.'' The voice belonged to Graham Perkin, who was no shrinking violet but a kindly chap. To say he was editor is to say Arnold Palmer plays golf, that Picasso painted. Perkin, a big man with presence, was ``a master craftsman of daily journalism'', as Alistair Cooke described the great American newspaperman H. L. Mencken. A bookworm and gifted writer, Perkin was passionate about his family, his parents, and a vigilant press (mendacious, venal public figures perused with apprehension their morning Age, as in David Syme's time). Perkin loved the Demons, art, architecture, golf (more than one 250-yard drive was squandered by four awful putts from 15 feet), and cooking. His father had been a baker in Warracknabeal. By the late 1960s, Perkin, editor at 36, had lifted The Age into the top 10.
The new office was in Spencer Street , where The Age took block over five months in 1969. The move started in May and was complete by October. Before you could say Ron Barassi that balmy March night, we were in Perkin's bright red Jaguar, with engines at both ends, roaring down Collins Street , for he believed in getting on with the job. At first sight, with the street lights bouncing off the cream facade, the new office looked like a puffed-up North Balwyn brick veneer. Inside it was a revelation. ``What do you think of that, Austin'', said Mr Big, or Monsieur le Grand, as some of us called him, when we alighted from the lift at the third floor. The accompanying nudge in the ribs would have sent John Nicholls flying. Stretching, almost as far as the eye could see, was a field of green _ a carpet the color of a billiard table, the MCG in spring. Only the pillars supporting the ceiling interrupted the flow of emerald.
``Wow'', said I, ``but where are the cubicles, the partitions, places to hide from you.'' Another nudge. ``The open plan, chap,'' Perkin replied with a grin. ``Everyone can see everyone.'' Oh, dear!
Within a few months, we had all moved to the wrong end of town - people,
presses, linotype machines, typwriters, clag, the whole caboodle. Perkin's grand open-plan worked. Up to a point. The smart reporters and subs hid behind the pillars. There was fun. One night a fellow sub called Clive Malseed rode a mini motor bike around the floor, dodging between the desks. Perkin loved it. After the paper went to bed, Perkin would trot out his gold putter and golf was partaken of at 50 cents a contest. After the first edition, he encouraged his troops to have a drink in the office. As usual the reasoning was faultless. ``If something big happens, I'd rather have you here than have to ring all the bloody pubs and clubs,'' he said.
Then, one night in 1975, after another 12-hour day, Mr Big went home and died, aged 45. I'm sure the green carpet shed a tear. All the people did. Before long computers came to pass and the composing room slowly withered away and the green carpet went. Those on the stone the last night of hot metal in 1983 rescued an old headline, a hunk of lead, anything to remind them of a joyous, boisterous 129-year era that Bill Gates probably couldn't give a tinker's cuss about. One nostalgic reporter bought a linotype machine for a song and took it home.
Now, as you know, by 2001 at a cost of $220 million, we will have a swish, new
building at Tullamarine where the paper will be printed. (The Age Print Centre
opened in July, 2003).
The other night I had a dream. I was flying along the Tullamarine Freeway in a bright red Jag. When we reached our destination the big bloke at the wheel said: ``Well, Austin , what do you think of that?'' ``Wow,'' said I, ``but where's the green carpet?'' (David Austin joined The Age as a cadet reporter in 1953 and worked fulltime for the paper for 40 years. He was sports editor from 1973 until 1980. He is now a contributor.)