Penrith: the working museum
The Penrith Museum of Printing is built around the machinery of the Nepean Times, the local newspaper whose equipment its founder, retired printer Alan Connell, set out to preserve; his vision for a "working museum" dates to 1987, and the museum opened on 2 June 2001 with the help of a Commonwealth Federation Fund grant, inaugurated by the local federal MP. It is laid out as a typical 1940s printing house, with a collection running from the mid-1840s to the 1970s (the museum's own history page tells the story).
The distinctive thing, per the museum itself, is that all of its equipment is kept in working condition, whatever its age: an 1860 London-built Albion hand press, a Wharfedale stop-cylinder press, Linotype and Ludlow hot-metal typesetting machines, cases of hand-set type. It runs as a volunteer-operated non-profit, opens every Sunday from 10am to 2pm ($5 entry, children free), takes tour bookings, and runs workshops. Its machines have also earned a screen credit: the museum helped the production team of the 2018 Bruce Beresford film Ladies in Black understand early Australian newspaper printing technology.
Melbourne: what dispersal looks like
The other pole of the story is a caution. The Melbourne Museum of Printing assembled what was widely regarded as the country's most comprehensive collection of printing machinery and type. It is now gone as a collection: the Association of European Printing Museums reported the holdings being auctioned off and dispersed, in a piece that also records the longer wave of closures, including the dissolution of the NSW Government Printing Office in 1989. Anyone citing the Melbourne museum as a going concern is out of date; that correction is part of why this page exists.
The craft is not only a museum piece
Letterpress persists commercially at the premium stationery end: the deep impression ("bite") into soft cotton stocks that offset physically cannot produce is a billable finish for wedding stationery and business cards (see our business card piece), and small studios run restored platen presses for exactly that work. On the artist side, the Print Council of Australia is the live national body for contemporary printmaking, relief printing included; it, not any letterpress trade guild, is where the practising community organises today.
Why a trade masthead covers this
Partly because the record matters: this machinery is the trade's own archive, and it survives only where volunteers keep it oiled. And partly because the craft still teaches. Make-ready, register, ink density and impression are letterpress words, and every one of them is still doing daily work on modern press lines (how offset works is, in a real sense, the same story with the type bent around a cylinder). If you want to feel why, Penrith is open on Sunday.