New challenges for Dunwell after four decades of change

Dec 19, 2016 at 01:58 am by Staff


Managing director of manroland Australasia Steve Dunwell - who has announced his upcoming retirement - looks back on four decades of technological change.

He hands over on February 1 to Dennis Wickham, who moves to the top job from sheetfed service, and projects manager Andreas Schwoepfinger will be appointed as director of technical services replacing Graham Wickham who is retiring in January. Both join the board of manroland Australasia, with Dunwell retiring on February 10 before heading off overseas.

He leaves both the company and its German parent "in the black" - the local operation with $20 million of sheetfed and web orders on the books - and says he has enjoyed "almost every minute". The qualification is a reference to the trying times when manroland became insolvent, and Dunwell was charged with "keeping things together".

A "£10 Pom", Dunwell arrived in 1971, one of a dozen friends looking for a new start in Australia; another was his wife, Carol.

It was, he says, "the best £10 I ever spent".

In fact, the likely lad from the east London suburb of Dagenham landed on his feet, finding himself "in the right place at the right time" on more than one occasion.

By 1977, he was selling Singer phototypesetters for Nova Graphics, with Lithocraft, then based in South Melbourne, his first customer for an eight-disk unit costing $15,300. Interfacing the Singer kit to Seligson Datatronics' Harris front end for an end-to-end demonstration at the PANPA conference the following year also brought another link-up, Dunwell joining Seligson Datatronics under Keith Christian.

With the move to cold-setting and offset, the Harris equipment was hot and more than 100 companies in Australia and New Zealand were keen for it, among them Rural Press which was to be his biggest customer. Change came however with Christian's sudden death (aged 50), a management buyout of the Harris press business, and reorganisation at Datatronics.

Dunwell took the opportunity to branch out, forming MediaTech in 1984 with partner Michael Joel - whose family owned the Mt Isa Star - and, with Rural Press putting in a good word, gained the Harris Composition agency. More leading technology came their way with agencies for ECRM - which made the Autokon scanner - and Israeli scanning, imagesetting and systems innovator Scitex doubling the size of their business.

The 2000 merger of Canadian CTP pioneer Creo with Scitex, was the time to move on, with Dunwell selling them the MediaTech assets, and moving to Currie & Co as NSW state manager in 2003.

Again, he was in the right place as sheetfed equipment began being supplemented by another hot product, HP's Indigo digital press. Steve Dunwell says he thought he would have ended his time at Curries had it not been for the 2009 offer to join manroland as managing director and run their business in Australia and New Zealand.

manroland's insolvency two years later made for interesting times, with the dominant challenge "holding things together," he says. UK-based Langley bought the sheetfed business, Possehl in Germany what became manroland web systems, and a matter of timing resulted in the latter buying the Indian and Australasian sales operations, which continued to sell the sheetfed equipment. Dunwell says the break is typically 60 or 70 per cent web newspaper and heatset, "but we're a stronger company for representing sheetfed".

At 67, he says it is now time to retire. Three months' European travel with wife Carol is booked for next year, but then Dunwell says he would consider another challenge, "part time or a specific project, something to which I could make a contribution".

Of the industry in which he has spent most of his working life, he says he thinks some newspapers are "giving up print too easily.

"Print publishing takes time and effort, and I think regional and suburban newspapers have a good life ahead of them... given a good sales team." He noted local News Corp suburban the Manly Daily - glossy last weekend - as a "fabulous product" and gave its publisher credit for a "more gung-ho" approach to print.

The early days saw some notable firsts in the Australian market: One was the first sale of the quaintly-named TeleRam Portabubble, a portable computer for editorial use which linked to the telephone system via an acoustic coupler; another the first Harris editorial page make up terminal, which led to a full bench industrial tribunal - to which he was called as a witness - when the PKIU print union tried to block its introduction.

Dunwell says it's not technology, but people that drive change, but over 40 years in the industry he's had a hand in the development of both.

Peter Coleman

Pictured: Long-term Hammers fan Steve Dunwell on hallowed ground in October

On our homepage: Dunwell with wife Carol

Sections: Print business

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