Vale Gina Ghioni

Gina Ghioni at a NSW Poets Union Reading, Performance Space, Redfern circa 1984 (Photograph Mark Roberts, Tribune Photographic Archive, State Library of NSW)

Rochford Street Review and P76 magazine were deeply saddened to hear of the death of Gina Ghioni on 24 August 2024.

In the early 1980s, when Adam Aitken and I started thinking about starting a poetry magazine that was to become P76, we were heavily inspired by a number of other gestetnered magazines of the times and, in particular, Magic Sam. Magazines like Magic Sam combined cheap gestetner printing with wonderful silk screen covers. But while we had a gestetner machine and access to a stencil cutter, we had no idea how to silk screen.

I had recently, however, become friends with Gina, who lived at that time in Morissey Road Erskineville, two streets down from Rochford Street. She was an architecture student who not only knew how to silk screen, but had access to the Tin Sheds on City Road. I soon realised that “access” meant climbing through a window at the back of the Tin Sheds at 10pm at night and working for a few hours each night for a week to print 250 wonderful colourful wrap around covers. The fact that P76 Issue 1 stood out amongst the small literary magazines of the time was a direct result of Gina’s extraordinary cover.

By the time it came to produce Issue 2, 3 and 4 Gina had set up her own printing workshop in the falling down garage at Morissey Road which we referred to as Erko Screenprinters. The covers of these early issues of P76 stand as a tribute to Gina’s artistic skills and still impress people 40 years later.

After the production of P76 Issue 4 Gina shared a house with Linda Adair and I in Randle Street Newtown. Some years later she returned to Byron Bay with her degree and built her architecture practice.

P76 and Rochford Street Review would like to express our condolences to Gina’s family and many friends.

– Mark Roberts