Scott Kernaghan, Typewriter Lover, Comes To Canberra

Yesterday was one memorable day. No sooner had I returned home after my typewriter talk at St Bede's school on Red Hill than three posts popped up on the Antique Typewriter Collectors page on Facebook, all from Scott Kernaghan, all sent from the typewriter exhibition at the Canberra Museum and Gallery (four days left!).

Straight away, I got on the phone to exhibition curator Rowan Henderson and explained that there was a man I very much wanted to meet down in the typewriter gallery. Not only that, but I had a typewriter I wanted to give him. "His name is Scott," I said, "he was flown down from Brisbane this morning". "What does he look like?" Rowan asked. "I don't know .. but if he's still there, please ask him to stay put and that I can be there in 10 minutes."
Rowan called back minutes later. "He's still there, typing merrily away on the IBM." Peter Brill will be delighted to know that Scott had mastered the Blick "Scientific" keyboard on the Selectric.
Ten minutes later Scott and I finally came face-to-face. What a delightful man! We spent the next three hours talking typewriters and looking at typewriters. Scott told me how his interest in typewriters was developed at an early age, through a maternal grandfather who worked for Adler for more than 40 years.
I was so thrilled that Scott had gone to the expense and made the effort to fly down from Brisbane especially to see the exhibition, just as Michael Klein had flown up from Melbourne a week earlier.

I handed over a Bijou portable typewriter to Scott, having promised some months ago to give it to him after he had so cleverly unlocked the secret of its strange keys. It was a Palestinian banking typewriter, which Scott promptly took out of its case and test typed.
After brunch, Scott came back home to look at some typewriters. He was interested in a plastic French-made Hermes 3000, but sadly I had given away the last one I had, just a few days earlier. It had come to me from the Australian National University and had a top row of mathematics symbols: π ∝ ∈ ≜ Δ ∑ ∏ ∞ φ, that sort of thing?
But Scott didn't go back to the airport and to Brisbane empty-handed last evening. As well as the Bijou, he was packing another gift, this chrome Royal portable, which he plans to work on to make it fully operational again.

I do hope Scott enjoyed his visit to Canberra! See Scott's blog The Filthy Platen here and his Google+ posts here.

POSTSCRIPT: Scott's photos taken at the typewriter exhibition yesterday, the top one being captioned "Typecast to Robert, from his Lettera 32."