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Abstract
This paper discusses the changing temporal contexts of overseas news in Australia's colonial press. The history of overseas news – its timeliness, periodicity and its forms – is enmeshed in international communication history and, specifically, in the history of Australia's changing time/space relations with the rest of the world as new technologies, particularly the telegraph, became available. From the point of view of editors and publishers, these changing relations presented major challenges of time management. More broadly, these changing relations (often thought of as involving time/space compression) progressively altered the temporality of colonial engagement, both imaginary and real, with the rest of the world as knowledge of the ‘new’ came to be increasingly shared within common timeframes.
Acknowledgements
Research towards this paper has been conducted with the support of the Australian Research Council. The author would also like to acknowledge the support of the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, where he was a Visiting Sabbatical Fellow in 2007.
Notes
1. The situation for the Aborigines was, of course, very different. Graeme Davison makes the interesting point that: ‘The fate of the Aborigines was to collide with a people whose conceptions of time had lately undergone a mighty revolution, and who were seized with an ambition to subject the whole world to the rule of the clock’ (9).
2. Lord Grenville to Governor Phillip, 15 Feb. 1791. Historical Records of Australia, Vol. 1, 1788–1796 (Australia: The Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1914): 215.
3. Henry Dundas to Governor Phillip, 15 May 1792. Historical Records of Australia, Vol. 1, 1788–1796: 354.
4. Tench's first volume, A Narrative of the Expedition to Botany Bay, was published in London on 24 Apr. 1789 by John Debrett. It recounts life in the colony (established on 26 Jan. 1788) up to the beginning of July 1788. Tench's manuscript would have been taken to London by one of the First Fleet convict transport ships which left New South Wales on 13 July 1788 and arrived in London at the end of March 1789.
5. Reuters, established in London in 1851, supplied international news to the Australian press from the early 1860s. For the early history of Reuters in Australia see CitationPutnis ‘Reuters’.
6. This is evident in a complaint made by the editor that a parcel of English papers addressed to the Australian had been intercepted by authorities in Hobart and not sent on. He commented: ‘Well might we feel surprised at the remissness of our agent in London – well might we wonder that those newspapers about which we had been so particular in giving minute instructions to be forwarded to us, had never reached us.’ In fact the editor knew that the true cause of the non-arrival of the papers lay with Hobart authorities. Australian, 23 Dec. 1824.
7. The Australian, it should be noted, began as a weekly but commenced bi-weekly publication from Apr. 1825.
8. This unplanned serialization might be usefully contrasted with the designed serialization of Victorian novels in relation to matters such as the structure of instalments and the management of suspense. On the effects of serialization on the Victorian novel see CitationHughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial. Serialized news was at times seen as being ‘novel-like’. The Melbourne Argus commented at the time of the Franco-Prussian War: ‘The news just received breaks off, like the end of a chapter in one of Charles Reade's novels, in the midst of a thrilling incident’ and ‘has only served to intensify the eagerness with which everybody will look forward to the arrival of the next mail’ (Argus, 21 Sept. 1870).
9. By the end of 1870 the European News was published in eight separate editions for markets in Africa, Asia, Australasia, North America and South America. They were monthly, bi-monthly or weekly, depending on the frequency of mail services to the particular region (see CitationPutnis ‘British Transoceanic’).
10. Australian historian Graeme Davison has suggested that ‘fast steamers and the extension of the submarine telegraph … increased the sense of fractured time’ in colonial Australia (58).
11. Time was standardized in Australia, via the establishment of time zones for Eastern, Central and Western Australia in 1895 (Davison 70–75).
12. David Syme to his nephew, 4 Sept. 1877. David Syme Letterbooks, State Library of Victoria.
13. Most notably, John Robert Seeley's The Expansion of England, a classic of British Empire ideology published in 1883, emphasized the importance of telegraphy in reducing the impact of distance across the Empire.
14. NSW Legislative Council member Richardson, NSW, Parliamentary Debates, 1885: 13.