Abstract
A study of the historical evolution of trans-Tasman press and cable connections within the British imperial context, such as is proposed here, requires from the outset a broad conceptual framework, including an understanding of recent communication historiography and of the ways in which it addresses contemporary concerns with globalisation, information flows and media convergence. The insights of the Canadian economic historian and communication pioneer Harold Innis1 remain a valuable point of departure for this purpose. In the wake of Geoffrey Blainey’s2 similar preoccupation with the tyranny of distance, recent work by Australian and New Zealand communication scholars3 has been informed by similar geographical concerns. Osborne and Cryle observe in the preface to their special Australasian Media History issue of 2002 that:
[Perhaps] more important than quantity is the need to reconceptualise Australian media history to acknowledge more clearly its dependent interconnections with broader Australian historical experience and to relocate it more substantially within the larger framework of Australian reconnections with larger worlds.4
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Notes
Harold Innis, Empire and Communications (Victoria, Toronto: Press Porcepic, 1986).
Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966).
Patrick Day, The Making of the New Zealand Press: A Study of the Organisational and Political Concerns of New Zealand Newspaper Controllers (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990).
Graeme Osborne and Denis Cryle, ‘Special Issue: Australasian Media History in 2002’, Media History, 8, 1 (June 2002): 7.
Paul Heyer and David Crowley, ‘Introduction’ to Harold A. Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), p. xix.
Dwayne Winseck, ‘Back to the Future: Telecommunications Online Service and Convergence from 1840 to 1910’, Media History, 5, 2 (1999): 138, 140.
Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India c. 1880–1922 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 5.
Peter Putnis, ‘The Business of Empire: Henry M. Collins and the Early Role of Reuters in Australia’, Australia Journal of Communication, 24, 3 (1997): 11–26.
Chandrika Kaul, ‘Imperial Communication Fleet Street and the Indian Empire 1850–1920’s’, in Michael Bromley and Tom O’Malley (eds.), A Journalism Reader (London and New York, 1997), p. 63.
Peter Putnis, ‘The Business of Empire’ and ‘Reuters in Australia: The Supply and Exchange of News, 1859–1877’, Media History, 10, 2 (2004): 67–88;
Simon J. Potter, News and the British World, The Emergence of an Imperial Press System 1876–1922 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2003).
Terhi Rantanen, ‘The Struggle for Control of Domestic News Markets’, in Oliver Boyd-Barrett and Terhi Rantanen, The Globalization of News (London: Sage, 1998), p. 38.
Kevin Livingston, The Wired Nation Continent: The Communication Revolution and Federating Australia, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 187.
John Henniker Heaton, ‘Penny a Word Telegrams through the Empire’, in Royal Colonial Institute, Report of Proceedings (London: The Institute, 1909), pp. 3–36.
JanVan Cuilenburg and Denis McQuail, ‘Media Policy Paradigm Shifts Towards a New Communications Policy Paradigm’, European Journal of Communication 18, 2 (2003): 181.
George Fenwick, The United Press Association Formation and Early History (Dunedin: Otago Times, 1929), p. 7; New Zealand Press Association Minutes, 1879 (Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington Acc 75–213).
Ross Harvey, ‘Bringing the News to New Zealand: The Supply and Control of Overseas News in the Nineteenth Century’, Media History, 8, 1 (2002): 27.
James Sanders, Dateline-NZPA The New Zealand Press Association1880–1980 (Auckland: Wilson and Horton, 1979), pp. 22–3.
Hugh Barty-King, Girdle Round the Earth: The Story of Cable and Wireless and its Predecessors to Mark the Group’s Jubilee1929–1979 (London: Heinemann, 1979), p. 63.
Coote entry, Australian Dictionary of Biography (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1969), 3, p. 455.
W. D. Le Sueur, ‘The Jubilee Conference of 1887’, in George Johnson (ed.), The All Red Line. The Annals and Aims of the Pacific Cable Project (Ottawa: James Hope and Sons, 1903), pp. 51–4.
R. Bruce Scott, Gentlemen on Imperial Service: A Study of the trans-Pacific Telecommunications Cable (Victoria: Sono Nis Press, 1934), p. 6.
Robert Donald, The Imperial Press Conference in Canada (London and New York: Hodder & Stoughton, 1992), p. 171.
T. H. Hardman, A Parliament of the Press: The First Imperial Press Conference (London: Horace Marshall, 1909), p. 50.
R. B. Walker, The Newspaper Press in New South Wales, 1803–1920 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976), p. 185.
Rod Kirkpatrick, Country Conscience: A History of the New South Wales Provincial Press, 1841–1995 (Canberra: Infinite Harvest Publishing, 2000), p. 175.
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© 2006 Denis Cryle
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Cryle, D. (2006). Peripheral Politics? Antipodean Interventions in Imperial News and Cable Communication (1870–1912). In: Kaul, C. (eds) Media and the British Empire. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230205147_11
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