Walker* Press

Walker* Press was a community-based printing business that ran from about 1971 to 1983, based initially in a room in North Fitzroy and then in rented premises at 20 Smith St Collingwood, and finally in a building at 21-23 Smith St Fitzroy bought for the purpose of housing the printing business as well as various activist groups working on southern Africa and Aboriginal issues.

In 1983 the building was transferred to the Community Radio Federation where it still houses radio station 3CR. 

Walker* Press pioneered the use of small offset printing and electrostatic paper plates to make offset printing available to many small community groups.

There is no single comprehensive history of Walker* Press, but this page provides access to many source documents that together provide multiple perspectives on the history of Walker* Press and associated groups.

Beverley Snell’s Autobiography of 20 Smith St provides an introduction to the early days of Walker* Press (prior to the move to 21-23 Smith St).

Lyndon Shea’s A Very Short History of Walker* Press has more detail on the later period. My recollections of Walker* Press fills in some of the gaps in these two documents and includes some detail on the equipment used at Walker* Press. 

I have created a separate History of 21-23 Smith St which explains how we bought the building and eventually transferred ownership of it to its current owners, the Community Radio Federation.

Lyndon started work researching a fuller history of Walker* Press but did not complete this before his untimely death. Follow the links for the outline of his proposed history, and a reformatted version of the list of groups for whom we did printing over the years.

Lyndon conducted a number of oral history interviews with people involved with Walker* Press. Recordings of these are now held in the National Library of Australia but most are not publicly available. 

Many of the samples of printing jobs completed by Walker* Press are now in the State Library of Victoria’s Ephemera Collection. The SLV also held an exhibition in 1990 called “Pressing Issues: Contemporary posters from local co-operative presses” which describes Walker* Press and a number of other contemporary or subsequent publishers.  Here is a copy of the catalogue (PDF 1.8MB). Not mentioned in the catalogue – which focuses mainly on protest posters – are the press run by Student for a Democratic Society in Carlton, Strawberry Press or the heroic, but I still think misguided, efforts to print using hot metal typesetting and a huge letterpress machine run by Arena magazine based on their interpretation of Marxist analysis of the problem of “the division between intellectual and manual labour”.

How to layout for Walker* Press was designed and printed in the later part of Walker* Press’s history (after I had left) and I think was mainly the work of Mark Carter. 

For reason which don’t make much sense now, at the time that Walker* Press was created, we were fans of The Phantom comics. In these The Phantom when he travels in cities uses the alias of Mr Walker and this was invariably asterisked with the footnote “* for Ghost who walks”. This is the origin of the asterisk in the name of Walker* Press.

JG January 2025