News, time and imagined community in colonial Australia

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.