The Trans‐Tasman Cable, the Australasian Bridgehead and Imperial History

Abstract

We are running a race with Time; we outstrip the sun, with the round world for the race-course. 1 The implementation of an imperial telegraph network over the course of the late nineteenth century caused a considerable amount of ink to be spilled, in praise, in fear and in confusion. By 1876, with the completion of the trans-Tasman cable between Australia and New Zealand, the British government could communicate with all of its major colonies by electric telegraph. As long as the lines remained intact (this was by no means a certainty), a message could be conveyed from London to Wellington, New Zealand, via the "thunderbolts of Jove". 2 The rapid contraction of time and space that this entailed was much commented upon by contemporaries, who marvelled at the reduction in communication time between England and her antipodes from 3-4 months to a matter of hours. As the most distant colony in the empire, New Zealanders took up the new technology with alacrity: by 1904 New Zealand telegraph traffic ran at twice the rate of any other country in the world, and 5 times the rate in the United States. 3 Although the bulk of these messages merely circuited throughout New Zealand and wider Australasia, it is quite clear that the telegraph was quickly identified as a useful tool of colonisation and nation building.Of course, the growth of the nineteenth century telegraph network captivated people worldwide. It came to symbolise the new power over nature represented by technological modernity. One commentator referred to the wires as "the nerves of the earth" 4 and early biologists like Emil DuBois-Reymond (1818-1896) used the metaphor of telegraph systems to formulate his theory of the human nervous system. 5

From outback icon to imperial time lord: ‘reinventing’ Sir Charles Todd (1910–2010)

“…Although commercial interests were heavily involved in proposals for the implementation of telegraph lines, these proposals invariably included a degree of either government subsidy or assurance of monopoly control of the industry. 68 Indeed, in the case of the OTL, much of the risk and expense fell to colonial governments, notably South Australia, which sought ongoing subsidies from the other colonies in return for its distribution service.…”

The Mechanics of Sovereignty: Autonomy and Interdependence across Three Cables to Iceland

“…Telegraph cables, during this period, were almost exclusively organized as imperial projects. As historian James Smithies (2008, 692) writes, “Electrical telegraphy was viewed by its various inventors and promoters as a ‘tool of empire’”; Alex Nalbach (2003) goes so far as to describe the British All‐Red Line as the “hardware” of Victorian hegemony. Unsurprisingly, then, many Icelanders were wary that a Danish telegraph would not be built to serve their needs (Jónsdóttir and Johnson 2006).…”

Etherealization in a Racial Regime of Ownership: Marconi in O‘ahu, circa 1900

“…In this article, I attempt to give this question its due. Building on recent efforts to account for how the unfinished histories of colonialism and empire striate, and in many respects underpin, the interface of "media" and "environment" (Walker 2018;Tully 2009;Starosielski 2012;Smithies 2008;Greaves 2018), in what follows, I consider what the Kahuku site might reveal about the historical entanglements between ICT development, settler agribusiness, and the colonial politics of land use in the Hawaiian Islands. Moreover, I wish to As of May 2020, the entire property-fully subdivided and outfitted with utility hookups-was listed for sale at an asking price of US$18 million (Magin 2020 show how these entanglements continue to inform how specific constituencies negotiate the politics of communication and connectivity across the archipelago, paying particular mind to how Hawaiian sovereignty activists have in recent years transformed the task of wireless ICT development into a means of contesting the material structures and political logics of colonial proprietorship-of designing and enacting alternative territorial imaginaries that unsettle those histories of dispossession, enclosure, and exploitation out of which Marconi Farms was born.…”