Happenstance is a wonderful thing.

I was helping J out yesterday by googling for some nineteenth century sources about early steamship travel to Australia when I came across this study (DOI 10.2104.ha070006) which confirms what I had suspected from my earlier posts on the Lincoln Assassination and the first internet about Australia’s connection with the rest of the world.

The author looked at reports of the Franco Prussian war in the Australian press of the time and the effects of ‘bunching’ caused by the overseas news arriving in distinct lumps, and also how Australian east coast newspapers had special correspondents placed at Albany to meet the mail steamers and work through the mail to create summaries to be telegraphed as soon as the connecting South Australian mail boat reached Adelaide.

The other thing that struck me about the study was how simple my lightweight study had been to carry out, compared to pre-digital days (less than a decade ago) when the author must have had to spend a considerable amount of time in newspaper archives rather than a  couple of lunchtimes playing with QueryPic …