Blink and you’ll miss it. Stare too long and you risk collision with a tram. At 357 Spencer Street there sits a grand old dame of Australia’s printing industry – the red brick former Sands & McDougall ‘Invicta’ printing works building, and adjoining sites.
From 1857 until 1974, Sands & McDougall produced annual directories containing all you needed to know about the emerging cities of Melbourne and Adelaide. The level of detail was formidable and included every business and household – they were the google of their day until the sheer size of them (3,500 pages by 1973) made them unwieldy. Google might send cars with cameras up every street for GPS mapping and location services but the Melbourne directories were resourced by a team of human door-knockers who would physically call on every house and business in the city; ask questions and feed the information back to the composition rooms. Needless to say advertising was sold on the pages and plenty of it.
Sands & McDougall, and its Sydney branch known just as John Sands were also commercial printers offering stationery, account books, greeting cards and so on. They adopted the motto ‘Invicta’ (undefeated) and a rampant stallion – the emblem for Kent, UK - used on buildings and stationery products. At one stage, the company was one of the largest employers in the Commonwealth, and boasted the tallest building in the southern hemisphere.
John Sands moved to Australia in the 1830s and initially formed a partnership with a man named Kenny as Sands & Kenny. After Kenny’s retirement in 1861, Dugald McDougall had his name elevated to the partnership and the business flourished in every city of Australia – there are Sands buildings still standing in Sydney, Perth and Adelaide. The businesses lasted for 143 years before bankruptcy sadly beckoned in 1994. The John Sands name lives on as a greeting card brand owned by American Greetings.
The West Melbourne Spencer Street site is actually a cluster of buildings with three street frontages, with the main tenant now the Menzies Institute of Technology. However, the site was sold to developers in December and plans have been approved for an 800-apartment high rise residential project, as West Melbourne seeks to become gentrified following the successes of Docklands and Williamstown.
It’s interesting to note that the fading painted sign on the side of the building (see below) proclaims ‘Printers and Lithographers; - as if Lithography was not ‘real’ printing in the 1880s when this building was erected. Well, it wasn’t viewed as such back then.
Maybe the Sands & McDougall name on the main building will fade away or even be demolished, who knows? Heritage architects have been known to retain facades of old buildings and what finer argument for this practice than the ‘sign of the prancing pony’ and ‘Invicta’ motto, atop this grand old dame of Spencer Street?
