The former Inverell Times office at 37 Vivian Street was passed in at auction on Friday.
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While there were no bids for the property, real estate agents The Professionals, and auctioneer Brian Baldwin, told Fairfax Media there had been interest from several local developers in the premises, and the were hopeful of selling the building within the next week.
For almost 80 years it was home to The Inverell Times (owned by Fairfax Media, publisher of the Leader).
The Times relocated to a smaller premises at the end of August this year.
The newspaper moved to the building in October 1939 after it had been especially built by the Times' then owner Northern Newspapers Pty Ltd as a printery and newspaper production centre.
It survived a fire in the 1950s, and the newspaper was printed on site until the early 1980s.
Laurie Barber started work as a journalist at the Times in 1958, and returned to work there several times. The final stint came in the early 1980s when he was editor.
“We’d wait for the press to start and the whole building would rock,” he recalled.
“Then (staff member) Eileen Dwyer would find some corrections and we would have to stop the press.”
In 1968 a second storey was added to the front portion of the office.
“(Managing editor) David Sommerlad’s office was upstairs at the front, with my office behind his and then the reporters at the back,” Laurie said. “Next to the reporters’ office was another room (later) used by typesetters.
“At the front was a board room. In the locked cupboard were half a dozen cans of beer which years later had to be thrown out because they had gone bad.”
The late Ron Pickering and Peter Seagrott were the last printers to work on the press when the Times was still printed in the building.
The printing of the paper was moved to Armidale, then to Tamworth, but the commercial printing business remained until 2002.
Brian Winmill worked there for more than 40 years, from 1959 until the printery section ceased operations.
While there was only about five employees working on the factory floor at the end, during the 1960s, Brian recalled that there were about 50 employees working in the building.
“There were a variety of printing presses there,” he recalled.
Prior to the construction of the building, the Times had operated from at least half a dozen different premises in the Inverell CBD between 1875 and 1939.