P.M.G Takes Control
On 1 January 1901, Federation birthed something enormous in Adelaide’s corridors. The Postmaster-General’s Department, tasked with stitching six separate colonial postal and telegraph systems into one national machine. Sir John Forrest became its first custodian, handed an impossible job but somehow held for seventy four years. The department grew to encompass everything that connected Australians. Letters delivered by horseback then truck, telegraph wires buzzing through the outback, manual switchboards where operators plugged calls through with practiced hands, eventually giving way to automatic dialling.
By 1946, the Overseas Telecommunications Commission reached beyond Australia’s shores, bring the continent into the global conversation while back home the PMG wrestled with an increasingly unwieldy beast delivering mail, broadcasting radio signals, distributing television frequencies and wiring every town for telephone service.
By the early 1970s Telecommunications had grown too complex, too expensive, too technologically advanced to ride piggyback on stamp delivery. A 1973 Commission of Inquiry declared the PMG needed to pack up and divide.