The other all-British route between Australia and Britain: the Indian ocean cable and Australian imperial communications, 1876–1901

Between 1876 and 1901, there was a push to open new telegraphic cable routes between the British colonies in Australia and Britain via the Indian Ocean. The six Australian colonies were initially connected to the outside world through a single existing route that ran through Java in the Netherlands East Indies and the British colonies of Singapore and India. This route was privately owned, expensive, unreliable, and passed through non-British territory, leaving the Australian colonies and the British colony of New Zealand with few options for their communications link to Britain. Initial advocacy for new telegraphic cable routes came from colonial-appointed officials, elected politicians and private commercial companies; however, many of these ideas and proposals did not translate into any new cables until the Eastern Extension Australia and China Telegraph Company, the private cable company that had dominated Far Eastern communications, built the South Africa to Australia cable, which was opened in October 1901. Drawing on primary source material from Australian and British archives, this article demonstrates that the cable across the Indian Ocean represented a genuinely all-British Imperial cable route between Australia and Britain – an achievement that is not often highlighted in the historiography that instead tends to focus on the other cable that connected Australia to Britain, the Pacific cable, which was completed the following year.