"In those days, national park interpretation was not an important function of the Forestry Department and, in fact, the only national park that seemed to receive any official recognition was Lamington, although the Curtain Fig of the Atherton Tablelands, Purlingbrook Falls and Natural Arch (or Bridge, depending on who wrote the text) did get a lot of coverage in tourist publicity, but not because they were a national park.
Averil and I were office bearers in the Brisbane Bottle Collectors Club and one of our roles was to write and print the monthly newsletter. To do this, I had a very old Remington typewriter and the Bottle Club's cantankerous Gestetner printer of similar antiquity. These gadgets might be before your time, but to summarise the production of a printed page, the text and drawings were typed or inscribed onto a waxed master sheet, which was then clipped onto a roller in the machine. By turning the handle, any number of poor-quality ink copies could be made until an ink smudge spoiled the master copy. A limited number of colours were available via a complicated and very messy procedure of changing containers and running cleaning fluid through the machine to remove the previous colour. Accordingly, one colour, usually black, was most commonly used. So using that "technique", I produced Girraween's first single page brochure, which included text and a couple of my wild flower sketches.
I made a small box to hold the brochures and put it on the front fence of the house. To my surprise, they went like "hot cakes", but after Head Office questioned the need for the A4 paper that I ordered, I had to limit the number that were put into the box. (I was reminded that all correspondence had to be submitted per the Departmental memo book, so why did I need copy paper?) Eventually, the paper supply did run out completely, so production of the brochure ceased. Despite its very amateur production, that brochure is a part of Girraween's history and I think that you would find it so."
Tom Ryan
Note the park's border on the map below. The brochure was produced before much of the farmland to the east and south became a part of the park, later in the 1970's.
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