During the Australian Antarctic Expedition of 1911 to 1914, Australian explorer Sir Douglas Mawson pioneered the use of wireless radio communications to Antarctica. In a bold move, he established a wireless station at Macquarie Island as a staging point from Hobart to the Main Base of the expedition at Cape Denison in the Antarctic.

Fifty-five years later in July 1969, Australians were again involved in innovative use of communications when the Australian Government supported NASA and the Apollo 11 Missions. The Parkes Radio Telescope and the Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station received live television footage from astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as they stepped onto the Moon’s surface, following the landing of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (LM) ‘Eagle’. In a classroom in Sydney, my kindergarten teacher turned on the TV so that we could witness mankind landing on the moon. My five-year-old self registered that it was an important event, but that was about it—my focus was on getting home from school to eat afternoon tea and to watch Gilligan’s Island!

I may not have reflected on the momentous feat of being able to send messages from the moon to Earth, but growing up in the 1970s I was aware that communication formed a key part of our daily lives; my family had a TV, telephone and a radio. These were the ways we connected with our world. We also got newspapers and mail, including postcards and letters from friends and relatives, packages from across the country and around the world. In 1977, I was impressed, on starting high school, that the Maths faculty possessed two computers. I remember thinking with some relief, ‘I’ll be too old to worry about it by the time computers become important’. How wrong I was!