Challenging Technological Determinism: Aborigines, Aussat and Remote Australia

Abstract

To trace the development and application of communication technologies is to follow the well worn paths of imperial European powers in their military and economic conquests of previous centuries. Relationships of dependency encompassing whole countries and spheres of influence grew out of the imperial routes of communication which passed and still pass through London and Paris. The communication networks of the nineteenth century, as now, ran parallel with imperial expansion. The British network of trans-Atlantic cables was widely acknowledged as giving Britain domination over international communications. However it was the United States which emerged from World War II best positioned to exploit the economic and political potential of a global economy, a consequence of the dislocations of war. American global military and economic ambitions were frustrated by the absence of the necessary communications infrastructure to support a global push (Chanter 1985). In retrospect it is possible to identify two strategies which evolved out of the United States and aimed to weaken the communications routes of the old imperial order.