beginnings

This page covers the shape and history of telecommunications in Australia and New Zealand up to the mid-1980s.

It covers -

• the colonial period
• first telephony
• shape of the network
• federation and the PSTN
• radio and picturegrams
• consolidation
• the emergence of data networks

     colonial period

Telecommunications in Australia began in 1854 with a telegraph line from Melbourne city to Williamstown, publicly funded but privately constructed (like South Australia's first line in 1856 from Port Adelaide to Adelaide city). At that time there were over 23,000 miles of line in the US (up from 12,000 miles in 1850, 2,000 in 1848 and 40 in 1846).

By 1856 the length of line in Victoria had grown to 36 miles, with 14,738 messages (increasing to 35,792 messages in 1857). During that year Victoria, NSW and South Australia agreed to collaborate on establishment of an intercolonial telegraph network. That agreement was the precursor of a series of agreements about infrastructure and rates. Messages going across colonial borders initially involved paper, with operators in one colony often transcribing a message which was then physically handed to a counterpart in the second colony (in some instances through a hole in a partition or a shared wall) for transmission over that colonies wire.

Adelaide and Melbourne were linked in 1858, the year in which the first NSW line was activated. A Sydney-Melbourne link was in place by November 1858. The first line in Queensland was activated in April 1861, with a connection to Sydney in November of that year. The first transcontinental line in the US dates from the same year. The first line between Launceston and Hobart dates from 1857, with a (short-lived) cable from Victoria to Tasmania in 1859. The first line in Western Australia - from Perth to Fremantle - came a decade later. By 1890 WA had 2,961 miles of telegraph line; that increased to 6,052 miles of line by 1901.

As of 1861 there were 110 telegraph stations across the eastern colonies. By 1867 there were 1,676 miles of line within Victoria, handling 122,138 messages (compared to around 7.92 million in the US and 5.78 million in the UK that year). Reuters, in competition with local news agencies, operated in Australia from 1860 onwards. the cost per word for a message from London was at that time equivalent to the average weekly wage.

New Zealand was slower off the mark, with its first telegraph line (from Christchurch to Lytletton) active from 1862. In that year there were around 32,000 miles of telegraph line and an estimated five million messages in the US, with 19,240 miles in the UK. The first telegraph link across New Zealand's Cook Strait was established in 1866.

A link between Adelaide and Perth was established in 1875, with the 2,900 kilometre Adelaide to Port Darwin link (the Overland Telegraph Line or OTL) in 1872 costing £300,000.

The OTL met the privately-owned Singapore to Port Darwin cable established in 1870 by the British Australian Telegraph Company. The latter was a predecessor of the current UK Cable & Wireless (CW) group. Its Batavia (Jakarta) to Broome link was completed in 1889, with a link to Perth via the Cocos-Keeling Islands (the present dot-cc cTLD) in 1901.

The first Australia to New Zealand telegraph link was achieved in 1876. Ten years later there were over 8,000 miles of line in Queensland alone. Brisbane was linked to New Caledonia in 1891.

     first telephony

For the first fifty years of its existence most people in Australia and New Zealand experienced telecommunications through telegraphy even where the telephone was available. It was thus at second hand, rather than directly person-to-person.

That experience often involved couriers, with a 'telegraph boy' for example delivering a handwritten or printed message to a residence, business or other location. It also involved use of official post offices and agencies, with individuals for example visiting an office and writing the message on a form which was then keyed for transmission to the desired destination. Messages were charged on a character by character basis and on the basis of distance, resulting in 'telegraphese' (truncated spelling and grammar that was a precursor of texting).

Australia's first telephone service (connecting the Melbourne and South Melbourne offices of Robinson Brothers) was launched in 1879, with the first telephone exchange opened in Melbourne in 1880 shortly before the hanging of bushranger Ned Kelly. Around 7,757 calls were handled in 1884.

New Zealand's first telephone exchange (in Christchurch) was active from 1881, a year marked in the US by the death of Billy the Kid.

The first Australian coin-operated public phones appear to have been installed in 1890, two years after their appearance in the US.

     shape of the network

The Australian networks were government assets operating under colonial legislation modelled on that of Britain. The UK Telegraph Act 1868 for example empowered the Postmaster General to "acquire, maintain and work electric telegraphs" and foreshadowed the 1870 nationalisation of competing British telegraph companies.

The nature of the networks meant that regulation in Australia was undemanding -

• network personnel were government employees or agents
• legislation was enhanced on an incremental basis (with some recognition of privacy and copyright concerns)
• restrictions could be achieved through infrastructure.

All the colonies ran their telegraph networks at a deficit through investment in infrastructure and subsidisation of regional access, generally with bipartisan support.

Government-operated post office and telegraph networks - the largest parts of the bureaucracy - were amalgamated into a single department in each colony on the model of the UK Post Office: South Australia in 1869, Victoria in 1870, Queensland in 1880 and New South Wales in 1893.

Configuration of the networks reflected the railway network, with the 'trunk' lines - what would now be characterised as the backbone - between Melbourne and Brisbane for example using the right of way alongside the state-owned railway track connecting those cities.

     federation and the PSTN

Section 51(v) of the 1901 Australian Constitution gave the new national government power over all postal, telegraphic, telephonic and 'other like services'. The latter encompassed future developments such as radio, television and the internet.

That responsibility is discussed in our profile on the Constitution & Cyberspace and in John La Nauze's crisp 'Other Like Services: Physics & the Australian Constitution' in No Ordinary Act (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 2001) edited by Helen Irving & Stuart Macintyre.

The colonial networks (staff, switches, wires, handsets, buildings etc) were transferred to the Commonwealth and became the responsibility of the first Postmaster-General (PMG), a federal Minister overseeing the Postmaster-General's Department that managed all domestic telephone, telegraph and postal services. With 16,000 staff (and assets of over £6 million) it accounted for 90% of the new federal bureaucracy. That figure climbed to over 120,000 staff (around 50% of the federal bureaucracy) by the late sixties.

At the time of federation it would have been appropriate to speak of a 'telephone divide'. Public phones were available in a handful of post offices and otherwise restricted to major businesses, government agencies, institutions and wealthier residences. Eight million telegrams were sent that year over 43,000 miles of line. (In the UK there were around 89 million messages.)

There were around 33,000 phones across Australia, with 7,502 telephone subscribers in inner Sydney and 4,800 in the Melbourne central business district. A trunk line between Melbourne (headquarters of the PMG Department) and Sydney was established in 1907, with extension to Adelaide in 1914, Brisbane in 1923, Perth in 1930 and Hobart in 1935.

Overseas cable links to Australia remained in private hands, reflecting the realities of imperial politics, demands on the new government's resources and perceptions of its responsibilities. The PMG department became responsible for some international shortwave services - particularly from the 1920s - and for a new Coastal Radio Service in 1911, with the first of a network of stations operational in February 1912. Australia and New Zealand had ratified the 1906 Berlin Radio-telegraph Convention in 1907 and supported the International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which required monitoring for distress calls by ships at sea.

During the 1930s the PMG became responsible for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), profiled here. Its management of the telecommunications network echoed the values enshrined by the ABC and the BBC - what once critic characterised as "male, middle class, middle brow and middle aged".

In the era of privatisation it has been fashionable to hark back to a time when the PMG was supposedly operated by enlightened technocrats in the national interest and without concerns of profit. That vision is problematical, as it is clear that decisions about the location and management of facilities (switches and service centres) reflected local political demands and the 'Australian Settlement' first articulated by Alfred Deakin.

The PMG was, after all, a major employer in rural areas, the Minister generally came from the Country Party and there was an emphasis on inhouse development and local manufacturing. Governments of whatever persuasion used the organisation as a cash cow; it was not a discrete statutory body or company and faced problems in preventing profits from being absorbed by the national consolidated revenue account.

In rural areas uptake of telephony prior to 1945 was inhibited by expectations that subscribers would provide/pay for wiring beyond a short length of line near the exchange. Many farmers accordingly constructed the lines themselves on a 'part privately erected' (PPE) basis that frequently involved use of substandard components (eg iron rather than copper wire) and layouts (eg strung from trees or along fences) with consequent poor performance and little privacy on shared 'party lines'.

     radio and picturegrams

In New Zealand the pre-emptive Wireless Telegraphy Act 1903 had provided that only the Government was permitted to receive/transmit wireless communications. Unauthorised wireless telegraphy was subject to a £500 fine and confiscation of equipment, with the Attorney-General announcing that

the whole principle of the Bill is that the Government intends to acquire a monopoly of this system in the colony

and thereby protect its investment in land-lines (a major revenue source in a primarily agricultural economy). Radio arrived some time later: the first domestic transmission was made by the Marconi Company at the 1906 Christchurch International Exhibition and the first trans-Tasman transmission was made from HMS Pioneer (in Wellington harbour) via HMS Powerful in the Tasman Sea to HMS Psyche (in Sydney harbour) on 3 February 1908. A government short-wave radio-telegraph link was established with Apia in 1927, extended to Rarotonga in 1930.

A public radio-telephone service between Australia and New Zealand commenced on 25 November 1930. In July of the following year that was linked to the UK-Australia radio-telephone service, which utilised beam wireless stations in Victoria at Ballan and Rockband and Ballan.

Those stations were opened in 1927 by Amalgamated Wireless Australasia (AWA). The company was an electrical conglomerate - the Australian equivalent of General Electric in the US - with interests extending from radio receiver manufacture to operation of commercial broadcasting stations. The two stations were primarily concerned with radiotelegraph traffic. New Zealand's first high-speed radiotelegraph service to the US commenced in 1942.

Facsimile services were introduced in both countries in the late 1920s, using the Siemens-Karolus picturegram system. Images were of low quality and transmission was slow and expensive, so that most traffic appears to have related to low resolution reproduction in newspapers of photographs and cartoons. In Australia the first photographs were transmitted between Sydney and Melbourne in 1929, with the first radio-picturegram from London received in Melbourne in 1934. Equipment at that time was only available at PMG premises or those of its agents such as AWA.

     consolidation

By 1939 Australia was 7th in the world teledensity ranking, with all capital cities except Darwin connected through a national network of 'voice grade' lines and 50% of services through automatic exchanges (significantly better than the UK and most of continental Europe). It has remained in the top ten and as the figures in the Internet Metrics & Statistics guide suggest currently has a greater per capita number of mobile phones than the UK and US.

In New Zealand the first licensed non-telegraphy radio broadcasts had occurred on 17 November 1921, with the first station being launched in Wellington in July 1922. The Broadcasting Act 1936, similar to Australia's Reithian Australian Broadcasting Commission Act 1932, established state broadcasting under a National Broadcasting Service (NBS), with the government progressively acquiring most private stations by late 1939.

By the mid-1940s debate in the Australian federal and state parliaments (and in fora such as newspapers and statements by industry organisations) suggests that telecommunications within Australia was regarded as an essential national service, an entitlement of all voters and outside many commercial constraints (with demands for delivery to remote/regional localities on a heavily subsidised basis).

In 1946 the federal government acquired AWA's shortwave broadcasting assets, which formed the basis of the Overseas Telecommunications Commission (OTC), a new statutory body with responsibility for the nation's international telecommunications services.

Establishment of OTC preceded nationalisation of Cable & Wireless in the UK during 1947 but reflected action by Canada, New Zealand and other dominion countries to take control of their non-domestic networks. OTC came to have responsibility for satellite links, commencing with INTELSAT II in 1966.

A public telex (teleprinter) service was available in Australia from 1954. Transmissions of picturegrams between PMG sites peaked at 6,280 in 1958, declining as individual media organisations, news services such as Australian Associated Press and a handful of industrial companies such as BHP installed their own picturegram equipment. Both the teleprinter and picturegram services were superseded in the 1970s as 'wet' and later plain paper facsimile machines became available. Those devices did not require special training or a dedicated line.

In 1975 telecommunication regulation and delivery was restructured, with PMG handling all postal services, OTC retaining responsibility for international telecommunications and the Australian Telecommunication Commission (trading as Telecom Australia) being established to provide public telecommunication services within Australia.

     the emergence of data networks

As preceding paragraphs have suggested, throughout most of Australia's history the dominant infrastructure model was that of a publicly owned network centred on the transmission of telegraphic and voice traffic rather than digital data. Telephone handsets were owned by the network operator, rather than by the subscriber, and in an echo of Henry Ford's quip about the Model T came in any colour as long as that was black.

From the 1960s, as mainframes became increasingly affordable (whether on a purchased, leased or time-shared basis), there was growing public and private sector demand for domestic and international data exchange. In Australia the Datel service, launched in 1969, featured modems leased from the PMG for transmission of data at low speeds over voice quality lines on a dial-up basis or at higher speeds over dedicated lines that had better performance characteristics but were only available between a few points. In 1973 around 2,500 modems were in use; that figure grew throughout the decade.

Declining infrastructure costs outpaced reductions in establishment fees and ongoing maintenance charges by the PMG, leading some major consumers such as the television networks to explore loopholes in the legislation that would enable creation of dedicated private networks (eg high-capacity microwave links between stations and television transmitters in NSW). Such moves were reflected in uptake of private facsimile machines throughout the 1980s: by 1993 the number of machines in Australia had grown to around 360,000.

Faced with demands from domestic and commercial users for lower prices and better access to the network (from the early 1970s most Australian households expected to have a fixed line phone) the monopoly network operator in Australia and New Zealand adopted two strategies.

One was to roll out basic infrastructure across the nation, minimising investment through technical compromises in the location of exchanges and use of twisted pair connections to households. Those compromises meant that much of the network in place at 2003 was unsuitable for ADSL. Upgrading to broadband was not possible without significant investment (unlikely given demands to raise revenue and profitability in a competitive environment).

A second strategy was to acknowledge that, rhetoric aside, all customers were not equal and that commercial customers - in particular major organisations - both could and would pay a premium for a higher quality of service based on enhanced infrastructure. One example in the 1970s was the PMG's Common User Data Network (CUDN), a packet-switching scheme allowing simultaneous access by multiple users for the exchange of information between computers and featuring a primitive electronic mail system.




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