The unforgiving minute: how Australians learned to tell the time 9780195534962

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Series Foreword (page iii)
Foreword (page iv)
Sources of Illustrations (page vi)
Acknowledgements (page viii)
Introduction (page 1)
I The Timeless Land? (page 7)
II Time Conquers Space (page 47)
III The Pursuit of Punctuality (page 79)
IV The Rapid Pulse of a Shrinking World (page 99)
V Time and Toil (page 124)
VI Time in Our Own Times (page 145)
Index (page 157)

Citation preview

AUSTRALIAN RETROSPECTIVES

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE @ HOW AUSTRALIA LEARNED TO TELL THE TIME

Graeme Davison

Sertes editor: David Walker

Melbourne

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford Auckland New York

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Kuala Lumpur Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland Madrid and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan OXFORD is a trade mark of Oxford University Press © Graeme Davison 1993 First published 1993 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act. no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission. Enquiries to be made to Oxford University Press. Copying for educational purposes: Where copies of part or the whole of the book are made under section 53B or section 53D of the Act, the law requires that records of such copying be kept. In such cases the copyright owner is entitled to claim payment. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data: Davison, Graeme, 1940The unforgiving minute. ISBN 0 19 553496 4.

1. Time measurements — Social aspects — Australia — History. 2. Clocks and watches — Social aspects — Australia — History. 3. Australia — Social conditions. I. Title. (Series : Australian retrospectives). 304.23

Printed by Nordica in Hong Kong *

Published by Oxford University Press, 293 Normanby Road, South Melbourne, Australia

¢ SERIES FOREWORD ° I? this series we have invited authors to examine formative issues in our national history in a style accessible to non-specialists. A number of authors have responded enthusiastically to this project, welcoming the opportunity it provides to address major questions in a brisk and intelligently speculative manner. No book in this series is designed to be the last word on its subject.

By treating major themes over an extended period, Australian Retrospectives will bring a sense of historical perspective to bear on matters of vital concern to Australians in the 1990s. James Jupp’s study of immigration proved an excellent starting point. Immigration has been at or near the centre of Australia’s white history for almost two hundred years. The pace of Asian immigration and the environmental impacts of population increases are high on the list of immigration-related public controversies. [mplicated: The US in Australia, the second publication in the series, is an incisive, fully researched study of the Australian—American relationship from 1788 to the present. In The Unforgiving Minute Graeme Davison provides the only

study we have of the meaning and measurement of time in its Australian context. At a stroke, Davison has opened new territory in this fresh and imaginative study. We can be excused for calling Australian Retrospectives a timely publishing initiative. We have a talented pool of authors to draw from

and a nation of readers demanding intellectual nourishment. We hope to honour their intelligent interest in Australia at a time when the nation is calling for new ideas and new ways of communicating them. David Walker Deakin University

¢ FOREWORD °¢ G raeme Davison time in as 1888 a subject when he was exploring how discovered Australians lived for the bicentennial series ‘Australians: A Historical Library’. In that year, he and his coauthors found, when clocks in Sydney showed noon it was 12.07 in Brisbane, 11.44 in Hobart and 11.35 in Melbourne. Outside the capi-

tals time was kept less precisely, but everywhere the extension of railways and their necessary timetables was compelling a movement towards uniformity. The place of time in Australians 1888 is a nice example of how an open-minded investigation of one year in the history of a society can yield revelations. Having sliced horizontally, Davison now slices vertically, following just one theme through the whole of our past—Aboriginal as well as European, from Dreamtime to flexitime—lighting it up all the way. At midnight on Sunday 1 February 1895, we learn, time was made to stand still as clocks over most of Australia were stopped and standard time, a commodity essential to modern society, was imposed. ‘Time’

as the word for a prisoner’s sentence, Davison tells us, is an Australian usage, created to characterise the convicts’ world, and his pages on ‘Doing Time’ are brilliant—the kind of history Foucault might have written had he known more history. Davison does time as Blainey did space; and since time and space form a continuum he draws much on Blainey’s work. I can’t think of a better way into Australian history, for newcomers or under-briefed natives, than a reading together of The Tyranny of Distance and The Unforgiving Minute.

A warning: as with that earlier classic, so with this, you may well be so enthralled as not to notice the passing of time. Ken Inglis W. K. Hancock Professor of History

Australian National University

¢ CONTENTS ¢

Series Foreword iii Foreword iv

Sources of Illustrations vi

Acknowledgements Vili I Clocks The Timeless Land? 7 and Compasses 9 Redeeming the Time 13 Doing Time 16

Introduction 1 The Tyranny of the Timetable 22

‘The Settler’s Clock’ 28

Local Time 33 II Time Conquers Space 47

The Long Voyage 47 ‘The Annihilation of Space by Time’ 30

Fractured Time 96 City Time and Country Time 60 Portable Time 65 Standard Time 70 III The Pursuit of Punctuality 79 Cardboard Clocks and Distant Bells 82 Time and Work 89 A Temporal Culture 94

Instant Time 103 A Watch for Everyone? 107

IV The Rapid Pulse of a Shrinking World 99

Faceless Clocks 109 Saving Daylight 114 V_ Time and Toil 124 The Clock takes Control 130 The Punctual Household 135

Time-Rebels 141 VI Time in Our Own Times 145

Index 157

¢ SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS * p. 7 National Maritime Museum, London. p.12 Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, ‘Vue de la partie méridionale de la ville de Sydney’, 1803, from Nouvelle-Hollande: Nouvelle Galles du Sud (La Trobe Library). p.17 Augustus Earle, ‘A Government Jail Gang, Sydney New South Wales’, 1830, from Views of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, London 1830 (National Library of Australia).

p.21 Photo of Port Arthur Watchclock from Queen Victoria Museum, Launceston. p.21 Samuel Bentham, ‘Building and Furniture for an Industry House Establishment’ in Jeremy Bentham, ‘Panopticon, or, The Inspection House’ in

his Works, New York 1962, opp. p. 39. | p.23 Parramatta Female Factory (photo from NSW Government Printer).

p. 32 Belfry at ‘Warrock’ (author’s photo). . p.34 Joseph Lycett, “View of Paramatta, New South Wales’ from his Views in Australia, London 1824 (National Library of Australia). p.34 StJohn’s Church, Parramatta (author’s photo). p.35 Geelong clock-tower (La Trobe Library Picture Collection).

p.37 Williamstown time-ball tower (photo by Simon Tranter). p.39 Sydney Observatory (photo from Holtermann Collection, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales). p.47 ‘Geographical clock’ (Picture Collection, National Library of Australia). p.51 Time-travel map (Garry Swinton). p.57 George Baxter, ‘News from Australia’, 1864 (Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia).

p.62 Flinders Street Station c. 1928 (Public Transport Corporation Archives). p.64 Time chart from Dr L. L. Smith’s Medical Almanac, 1886 (La Trobe Library). p.69 Waterbury Watch poster (chromolithograph from Troedel Collection, La Trobe Library).

p.79 Eight Hours Monument (photo by Simon Tranter). p. 83. Melbourne Orphan Asylum, Melbourne Illustrated News, 1874 (National Library of Australia).

p.85 Prahran State School (photo by N. J. Caire in Picture Collection, National Library of Australia).

p.90 Burra mine bell (author’s photo). p.94 Cooking class, Illustrated Sydney News, 1874 (Picture Collection, National Library of Australia). p.99 Photo of Hinkler medal (La Trobe Library). p. 103 Radio advertisement, Radio Experimenter and Broadcaster, 15 November 1924, p. 16 (La Trobe Library). p. 107 Watch advertisement, Australian Watchmaker, October 1955, p. 26 (La Trobe Library).

p. 111 Taximeter advertisement (Melbourne City Council Archives). p. 113 Cartoon of parking meters (Melbourne City Council Archives). p. 114 Regulator clock advertisement (Melbourne City Council Archives). p. 126 ‘Cincinnati’ clock advertisement (Melbourne City Council Archives).

p. 132 Time-and-motion man, Manufacturing and Management, October 1946 (National Library of Australia). p. 137 Baby-feeding clocks from F. Truby King, Feeding and Care of Baby, Dunedin, 1910, p. 32 (La Trobe Library). p. 1389 Hoover advertisement, Australian Home Beautiful, October 1963, p. 20 (La Trobe Library). p. 145 ‘You're Late’ sign (photo by Simon Tranter).

p. 153 Gog and Magog (photo by Brian Carr). p. 153 Melbourne Central clock (photo by Brian Carr).

¢ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS * [es book is the of spread intermittent periods of serendipitous research andproduct reflection over several years. My interest in the topic germinated during the process of writing chapters for Australians 1888, a volume in the bicentennial series ‘Australians: A Historical Library’, and I am indebted to my fellow volume editor, John McCarty, and fellow contributors, John Hirst and Allan Martin,

for useful references as well as comments on earlier drafts. Ken Inglis, general editor of the series, also offered tips on sources. Since time is a dimension of all human activity, rather than a segment of it, the sources for a history of time are essentially scattered, and much of the material used in this book has come to light as a by-product of research on other topics, through the suggestions of friends and col-

leagues, and through browsing in horological sources. Shirley Constantine, my research assistant on a history of urban Australia, found some of the material on the early colonial period and gave advice on an aspect of her own work, the uses of clocks in cooking. I wish to thank Jim, Lucy and Mim for allowing their holidays to be interrupted by my roadside investigations of public clocks, bells and other remnants of the colonial time-regime, and Barbara Davison for finding time in the midst of her own busy schedule of research and

writing to talk about time and to read the manuscript. The habit— which I now forswear—of introducing my time obsession into conversations with friends and fellow Australian historians has often yielded valuable nuggets of information. I particularly wish to thank Margaret Anderson, Bain Attwood, Marian Aveling, John Barnes, Andy Blackburn, Don Chambers, Tony Dingle, Halina Eckersley, John Eddy, Alan Frost, Charles Fahey, Tom Griffiths, Helen Harris,

Graham Hercus, John Lack, Marilyn Lake, Oliver Macdonagh, Andrew May, Stephen Mennell, Mark Peel, Ian Rae, John Rickard, Di Sedgman-Cooper, Dick Selleck, Oscar Spate and Lucy Taksa for ref-

erences and suggestions. I am grateful, as always, for the help of Rosemary Johnston, who helped to organise my own time in ways that made possible the writing of this book. For the conclusions and speculations of the text I alone am responsible. Graeme Davison

¢ INTRODUCTION * I n to thethe long history of technology, from been the invention the wheel silicon chip, there has surely no moreof momentous episode than the invention of the clock. Ours is a clockwise society. Children learn to tell the time before they can even read or write. We don our wristwatches as soon as we rise and take them off only as we go to bed. Our everyday lives are governed by the steady tick-tock of hundreds of clocks—the alarm clock or clock radio that wakes us;

the electric timers that ensure our eggs are boiled and that our clothes are washed and dried; the time-checks on the radio that prompt us to depart for work; the traffic lights that marshal us into the flow of traffic; the punch-clocks that monitor our arrival on the job; the desk computer that logs our times of keying in; the telephone exchange that times our calls; and the pre-set video-cassette recorder that punctually tapes our favourite television programmes. Clocks are so inseparable from our late twentieth-century way of life that it comes as a shock to realise that barely a century ago many Australians could literally not have given the time of day. Many could not afford a watch and lived out of sight and earshot of a public clock. Even in the towns, timekeeping was often an uncertain matter, with clocks regularly breaking down, and with each town setting its own time independently of its neighbours or, worse, keeping two or three

times independently of each other. Punctuality, the pre-eminent virtue of modern life, was learned only slowly as colonial Australians gradually accustomed themselves to the rule of the clock.

This book is about how Australia learned to tell the time. It is a story, not just about clocks, but about the people who used them. From the beginnings of European settlement, Australians were as clockwise as any people on earth; indeed, the navigators and the military officers who laid the foundations of Australian setthement were

contemporary experts in the measurement of time. But it was only gradually, as society disposed rather than as technology proposed, that the majority of Australians came to order their everyday lives by the clock.

This was a historical process that unfolded unevenly, with moments of retreat as well as rapid advance. The main thresholds in time-awareness coincided with clusters of significant technological developments. In this study I pay particular attention to four crucial episodes. The first occurred in the late 1820s and 1830s, when colonial officials sought to reinforce the dissolving structures of penal 1

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

society by the introduction of new clock-based systems of authority, and erected a rudimentary system of public time. A second, and more fundamental, change came in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. It coincided with the impact of the railway, the telegraph and

the pocket watch and culminated in the establishment of standard time zones. A third, in the years around the First World War, witnessed the appearance of the radio, telephone, automobile and wrist-

let watch and the introduction of ‘scientific management’. And a fourth, which is still under way, coincides with the advent of the computer, the communications satellite and mass air travel.

Under the immediate impact of these changes, contemporaries often expressed a sense of excitement, amazement or alarm. The new developments were said to be ‘miraculous’ or, in a phrase often repeated, space was said to have been ‘annihilated by time’. The sense of

amazement and disorientation that accompanied the arrival of new inventions usually passed quickly—in a period of rapid technological change people simply got used to being amazed. The social implications of the new technologies and time-practices, however, often sunk in more slowly. Time, as many contemporaries argued, was a kind of

commodity, and, like other commodities, it could become a fetish. The fierce resistance that people offered to changes in their daily timetables—from strikers resisting the introduction of punch-cards to farmers resisting daylight saving—often derived from the friction between two contemporaneous, but discordant, time-regimes. Time is the very stuff of history, as fundamental to its character as

land to geography or matter to physics. The great French historian Fernand Braudel likens it to the soil that sticks to the gardener’s spade.’ Historians constantly shape and reshape time, arrange events within it, make metaphors for it. They often resort to such devices as ‘time-lines’, or liken time to a ‘stream’ or a ‘tide’. They sometimes write about the ways in which time and time-measurement enter into particular phases or sectors of social life—into navigation, or communications, or labour management, or schooling, for example. But they

seldom direct their attention to time itself as a basic dimension of social life.

In the following pages I have sought to uncover the hidden connections between aspects of Australian history that are usually considered separately. Time-consciousness, I wish to argue, was a fundamental organisational principle of everyday life, one which both

constrained and enabled successive generations of Australians to order their collective life in distinctive ways. The concepts of time 2

INTRODUCTION

that people employed in one phase of their lives tended to spill over

into others, the more so as people treated time itself as a kind of common currency that could be spent or saved, found or lost, bought or exchanged. Changes in time-consciousness in one sphere of life— in transport or labour, for example—were often linked to changes in

others—say in domestic life or sport. Twenty-seven years ago Geoffrey Blainey argued that the ‘tyranny of distance’ was a fundamental factor in Australian history. Time, too, could be considered a

tyrant, although, like distance, its impact upon our lives is not absolute but relative to the ways we understand and shape it.’ Understanding how time has been reshaped in the past may help us to become more alert to some of the profound changes in time-consciousness that are still under way in our own times. The development of time-consciousness in Australia is a local variation on the global theme of modernisation. The transition from a traditional, local, task-oriented society to a modern, cosmopolitan, time-oriented society is a favourite theme of the classical sociologists,

including Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Tonnies, Simmel and Elias. ‘Economy of time,’ writes Marx, ‘to this all economy ultimately reduces itself.’* Social theorists and historians have observed a striking coincidence between develcpments in the social organisation of time, such as the introduction of standard time zones, and changes in the understanding of time itself’ In his fascinating book The Culture of Time and Space, Stephen Ke-n delineates a broad transformation through which the whole apparatus of late nineteenth and early twen-

tieth-century European society, from pocket watches and train timetables to cubist painting and theoretical physics, was coming to express a more rationalistic conception of time. It heralded a world in which time would be measured with ever greater precision; in which human activity and human effort would increasingly be judged by temporal criteria; and in which individuals, widely separated in space,

would come to share a common time through the new forms of telegraphic and telephonic cornmunication.’ Perhaps this was the condition that Marx had anticipated when he wrote, rather cryptically, of ‘the annihilation of space by time’.’ Now, according to the geogra-

pher David Harvey, we are in the midst of yet another profound transformation in our sense of t.me. The arrival of the computer, the communications satellite and the rapid global circulation of capital has brought about ‘an intense ghase of space-time compression’ so disorienting and disruptive as to be considered the underlying ‘condition of postmodernity’.° 3

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

These bold formulations should make us both curious and sceptical. The modern person, full of projects yet perennially up against deadlines, is apt to look back wistfully to a time before clocks and to

mourn its passing. But we should remember that its passing, like those other hallmarks of modernity, ‘the rise of the middle class’ and ‘the birth of scientific rationalism’, has been a long time a-coming.

The medieval historian Jacques le Goff locates the supplanting of ‘church time’ by ‘merchant’s time’ in the late Middle Ages, while the English historian E. P. Thompson perceives the late eighteenth cen-

tury as a period when clock-time was already widely observed by working people as well as their masters. Yet many people, in Europe

as well as the New World, remained seemingly immune from the daily rule of the clock well into the twentieth century.’

We need more precise benchmarks for a historical process too frequently, and misleadingly, represented in terms of simple dichot-

omies. These benchmarks might enable us to take account of the variable rates of change between one sector of society and another.

In nineteenth and twentieth-century Australia we may usefully distinguish between five broad spheres of time organisation. Personal

time concerns the way in which individuals take account of time independently of the lives or routines of others. A solitary pensioner

boiling an egg or a lonely selector measuring the progress of his labours against the movement of the sun across the sky are examples

of such personal time-practices. Domestic time is the time of the household and regulates the co-ordination of those activities—cooking, eating, washing, mending, gardening, sleeping—on which its members depend in common. In households which were also workplaces, such as family farms, handloom-weavers’ cottages and factoryoutworkers’ tenements, domestic time might connect only tenuously

and intermittently with the time kept by the rest of the world. Local time is the time of the local community—the village, town or city—and it regulates such common activities as shopping, church services and public meetings. There could sometimes be doubt about the boundaries of the local community, and hence about the determination of local time, but, in essence, local time is the time shown by the post-office clock or chimed from the church steeple. Fourthly,

there is national or standard time, the device through which the activities of widely scattered communities became synchronised by reference to a single regional or national standard, disseminated and reinforced by new and speedy forms of travel and communication, notably the railway and the telegraph. Finally, in the early twentieth 4

INTRODUCTION

century, as the wireless and the aeroplane shrank the distance between continents, Australians reached the threshold of a new era of global time.

The cultural revolution in time-management can be conceived as the gradual permeation of clock and calendar-based routines through these various spheres of human activity—sometimes outwards from the household to the nation and the world, as personal habits of timethrift became the standard of public life—sometimes inwards from the larger society to the family, as the timetables of the factory, the railway and the television station reordered people’s private lives.

Understanding how this transformation occurred also calls for a subtle understanding of the interplay of social and technological, local and international influences in the making of new temporal regimes. Changes in time-consciousness were often linked to phases in the development of modern capitalism. “The capitalist order’, writes Nigel Thrift, ‘takes the form of a new hegemony based upon routinised, reciprocally confirming, calculative practices and projects

grounded in a functional, spatial and temporal differentiation of production and consumption, thus increasing the division not only of labour but also of space and time.” Yet while a more rationalistic attitude to time meshed closely with the imperatives of modern capitalism, capitalists and their servants were not always its primary agents. In Australia, as we shall see, merchant’s time and factory time were established on the foundations of the more ‘traditional’ time disciplines exercised by the naval officer, the soldier, the parson and the gaoler. Abrupt shifts in time-consciousness and time-management

often coincided with wars or other national emergencies, and the state, as Norbert Elias suggests, was foremost in the inculcation of respect for measured time.’

Punctuality, moreover, was not only a discipline imposed from above, but a virtue cultivated voluntarily from below. Time-thrift was

part of the cultural baggage of many respectable Australian immigrants, an article of moral equipment that may have been as congruent with the interests of the workingman as of his master. We need to think of the development of time-consciousness in its cultural as well as its geographical dimension, as a process of ‘time-deepening’ as well as ‘time-widening’.

As I began to think about the subject of this book, I was reminded of some popular verses written by that paragon of clockwork punctuality, Rudyard Kipling. Gilt-framed and printed in illuminated letters, they used to hang above the bookcase in my childhood home: 5

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you'll be a Man, my son!

Written in 1911, as the third of the four modern revolutions in timeconsciousness reached its climax, Kipling’s ‘If captures the competitive, guilt-inducing, masculine morality underlying it. It reminds us

that the clock on the wall or in the waistcoat pocket is but the metronome for a soul already singing the music of modernity.

Notes 1 ‘History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée’ in Fernand Braudel, On History, translated by Sarah Matthews, Chicago 1980, p. 47. 2 Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance, Melbourne 1966, passim; and compare John Hirst, ‘Time—was it a tyrant?’, Historical Studies, vol. 16, no. 64, 1975, pp. 435-47. 3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (1857) as quoted in David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford 1989, p. 227.

4 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1914, London 1983, passim. 5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse as quoted in William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York 1991, p. 92. 6 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 285 and passim.

7 E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, vol. 38, 1967, p. 69; and see Jacques le Goff, Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, Chicago 1980, pp. 29-42 and his Medieval Civilization 400-1500, London 1988, ch. 6, ‘The Framework of Time and Space’. 8 Nigel Thrift, ‘Owners’ Time and Own Time: The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness, 1300-1800’ in Alan Pred (ed.), Space and Time in Geography: Essays Dedicated to Thorsten Hagerstrand, Lund Studies in Geography, Series B, Human Geography, no. 48, London 1981, p. 56; also see Thrift, ‘On the Determination of Social Action in Space and Time’, Environment and Planning D Society and Space, vol. 1, 1983, pp. 23-57, and compare E. P. Thompson, pp. 06-97. 9 Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay, Oxford 1992, p. 54. ‘The need for an orderly and unified time-reckoning varied in accordance with the growth and decline of state-units, and with the size and degree of integration of their peoples in territories and the corresponding degree of differentiation and length of their commercial ties.’

6

I

THE TIMELESS LAND?

\Abv Waa os Ae ee oe ie fa _ ~ ye ae : a y a - gy a e ed | cg an ae be oF

ae Fe ce ee, a A George Baxter’s News from Australia (1864) dramatises the time-gap between the colony and the homeland in the arrival of the post and the attentive posture of the recipients. Note the emigration poster on the wall and the large remittance in the older couple's hands. (Nan Kivell collection, National Library of Australia)

At a public level, the time-gap meant that, while Australians could join their homeland cousins in calendrical celebrations—the Queen’s Birthday, Christmas or St Patrick’s Day—they were largely excluded from patriotic celebrations or trials of a more spontaneous kind—the

rejoicings over the costly British victory at Inkerman in 1894, for example. If colonials were inclined to cringe, perhaps it was because their conversation forever lagged a step behind that of their British

contemporaries. They always knew that any opinion they uttered could be confounded by events occurring without their knowledge on the other side of the world. In their correspondence, Australian immigrants and their families frequently remind themselves of the agonising time-gap that separated them. As they report on how they are, they try to anticipate how their news will ‘find’ the recipients many months hence. More versed in speech than writing, and used to the easy familiarity of daily contact, they struggle to make their feelings felt across the great gulf of

time and space. ‘I should like to be with you a short time and help you build you house and to spend a few socal hours to geather but 57

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE | the Long distance pervent,’ Henry Carley explained to his sister | Susannah, who had lately joined her husband Francis Mapleson in | goldrush Melbourne. They exhort their loved ones to reply quickly | so as not to miss the return mail. ‘If we write as soon as we receive : each others letter we shall communate regular and often,’ Carley | reminded his sister. They fret when the mail ship arrives without any | news, and wonder if some misfortune has befallen their loved ones or | if some shadow of misunderstanding has come between them. ‘Not :

knowing how this may be received somewhat mars the pleasure I | should have in writing,’ Francis’s brother Charles begins one of his | letters. Such diminished pleasure was inseparable from the sense of | fractured time that went with the hazards and long delays of the sea : mail. Only the anticipation of being reunited in eternity could : seemingly compensate for the time which the vast ocean had taken |

from them.” | Fast steamers and the extension of the submarine telegraph to the :

United States and to India gradually lessened the delay, but , increased the sense of fractured time. When Queen Victoria fell ill at | Balmoral in mid-August 1871, it took more than five weeks before | Australians read the briefest summary of the news which had trav- : elled via the Atlantic cable, overland across the United States and by |

ship from California. ‘This sudden indisposition’, they learned, ‘caus- |

es great anxiety in the Royal household.’ In the absence of further ! news, the only reassurance that colonial editors could offer their | patriotic readers was the observation that ‘HER MAJESTY comes of a | long-lived family’. Not until five weeks later did the happy news arrive, again from California, that “The Queen is recovering’. Only at | the end of October, nine weeks after the beginning of the Queen’s indisposition, and ten days after the news of her recovery, did the

arrival of the mail from England with copies of the London dailies . enable Australians to read, for the first time, a fuller and less disturb- | ing account of the royal illness. ‘For several weeks’, it turned out, ‘the | Queen [had] been suffering from headache, neuralgia and lassitude.’” |

The most dramatic break in Australia’s temporal isolation came | with the completion of the telegraphic cable link between England and Australia in 1872. Messages tapped out in Morse code travelled |

along the submarine cable from London through Lisbon and |

Gibraltar to Alexandria, by overland telegraph to Suez, by cable via : Aden to Bombay, overland again to Madras, by cable once again to | Penang, Singapore and Batavia, overland to Banjoewangi, under the |

sea to Darwin, and finally along the newly constructed Overland ! 58

TIME CONQUERS SPACE

Telegraph to Adelaide. Information could now be conveyed from the

periphery to the centre of the Empire in hours rather than weeks. Ardent imperialists greeted the development as a striking demonstration of ‘the practical annihilation of time and space’.” The price of annihilating time was high. It cost almost £9, or more

than twice a week’s wages for a skilled man, to send a message of twenty words from England to Australia. Because messages had to take their place in a queue, and had to be transmitted by repeater stations along the way, there was a delay of between fifteen and twenty hours between the sending of a message in London and its receipt in Sydney or Melbourne. Gradually, as the cable was duplicated, the speed of the service improved. By 1900 a message took only six

hours, although the cost remained high, about 3 to 4 shillings a word.” International telegraphy was all but monopolised by largescale commercial users, either for the transmission of news by Reuters or the other newsagencies, or for sending coded commercial intelligence by merchants and bankers. It meant that some colonists

had privileged access to the future while others, less prosperous, remained prisoners of the present. ‘I suppose you are aware that as the line is now worked the small man is placed in an unfavourable position as regards the large man,’ observed one businessman, citing the disadvantage suffered by a miner who wished to sell a small parcel of minerals to a merchant when the latter had access by cable to the latest London prices.” The effect of the submarine telegraph, therefore, was not to compress time but to bend it. Instead of accelerating all information flows proportionally, it reduced some to barely a fiftieth of the old time while others were hardly speeded up at all. Compared with the volume of information passing from England to Australia by sea mail, the carrying capacity of the submarine cable was pitifully small. Fifty or so words a day was all that the colonial newspapers could afford to transmit at first. So while colonial readers read the European headlines almost as soon as Londoners, they had to wait for several weeks to read the reports and editorials that explained what had happened. It was as though they lived simultaneously in two time-frames, one of apprehension, the other of understanding. The telegraph strengthened Australia’s awareness of its imperial links and the very brevity

and immediacy of the messages that came down the wire— ‘Khartoum besieged’, ‘Mafeking relieved’—may have heightened the

sense of urgency with which colonials responded to the Empire’s call. Two months later, when the London newspapers arrived bearing

509

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their tedious freight of facts, the mind of the colonists had often been

made up. Long before Marshall McLuhan invented the terms, Australians had learned the difference between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ media

by experiencing the difference between the immediacy of the telegraph and the slowness of the mail.

City Time and Country Time When news arrived from abroad, it travelled quickly around the colonial cities. If the news was startling enough, newspaper proprietors put out special editions and the headlines were soon being cried out

by newsboys from door to door. City-dwellers were used to such speedy communication, for their whole way of life depended upon it. The clash of timetables, and the need for punctuality and synchroni-

sation, were greatest in the cities. “The technique of urban life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities into a stable and impersonal time schedule,’ observed the German sociologist George Simmel in a famous essay on “The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1900).”

In the 1850s the horse omnibuses which were Melbourne’s main

form of street transport operated only according to a sketchy timetable.* It was common for drivers simply to wait at the stop until

their vehicles were full before setting off. By the late 1870s, however, the congestion created by drivers waiting at the bottom of

Elizabeth Street had become so serious that the Melbourne City Council was obliged to employ a man with a stopwatch to enforce a

maximum waiting time.“ In 1882 a four-faced tower clock was erected at the Elizabeth Street entrance to Flinders Street Station as an aid to departing passengers.” On the fixed railway and cable tram

systems the tolerance for unpunctuality was becoming finer. In 1860 trains ran from Melbourne to St Kilda about every half hour. In 1870 they departed every twenty minutes, and by 1890, peak-hour trains ran every ten minutes. Catching the morning train became a

matter of fine timing and commuters soon learned the perils of unpunctuality as they puffed down the platform in pursuit of their departing train. Melbourne’s cable trams required a similar standard of punctuality. Each car was pulled at a uniform speed by a constantly moving cable. If a car lost time in picking up passengers, or because a horse 60

TIME CONQUERS SPACE

obstructed the way, or because it got stuck halfway round a corner, there was no way of speeding up again except by cutting down the time for future stops. When the system first opened, the only check on drivers’ punctuality was kept by the line manager or clerk, who compared the arrival time of each tram with the timetable as they passed the engine house. Early in the twentieth century the company introduced a more sophisticated system of punch-clocks distributed at regular intervals along each route. At the time signified by the timetable, the driver was required to insert a special key in the clock, which registered the time by punching a distinctive mark on a calibrated roll of paper which slowly unfurled in time with the movement of the clock. At the end of the day, when the paper roll was collected

from the clock, the line manager could identify which trams had been late and hold the driver to account.”

It is worth pondering the logistical assumptions of the late nineteenth-century communications system. Whether we think of trains running on iron rails, trams hauled by constantly moving cables, or telegrams transmitted along singing wires, temporal ordering was an essential feature of their efficient operation. The clock was a gatekeeping mechanism for permitting passengers, parcels and messages access to the one public conduit along which they could flow. Its effect was to marshal activity into time-space bundles and hence to organise society around common timetables of work, travel, recreation and sleep. Under the influence of the railway and tramway timetable, metro-

politan life began to exhibit a rhythmic ebb and flow akin to the rhythms of nature itself. By the turn of the century, the capital cities were the heart of great circulatory systems whose pulse was transmitted to every corner of the land, and from Australia to the rest of the world. Perhaps their most striking emblem was the great train indicator boards, with their rows of clock-faces indicating departure and arrival times, that greeted travellers as they entered the cities’ main rail terminals. The new railway terminals erected by the New South Wales railway at Redfern in 1906 and by the Victorian Railways at Flinders Street in 1910 were each crowned by towers and domes with large illuminated clocks, and incorporated the most sophisticat-

ed train indicator systems in Australia. A journalist observing the scene at Melbourne’s newly opened Flinders Street Railway Station in 1910 marvelled at the almost military precision and punctuality of the hundreds of thousands of suburban commuters who entered its gates each day. 61

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

The secret of [their] prompt passage ... is that they are unconsciously drilled, and every unit knows the drill. There are in the station five island platforms, between each of which runs two sets of rails ... On the busiest suburban lines the trains are in and out in three minutes, and the passengers of one have passed down the stairs and subways or up the covered ramps, and thence through the wickets, in time to leave the platforms for the arrival of the following train. The majority of the crowds know their way and unconsciously practise despatch. But even in the case of a stranger, the means of exit are so obvious, and the approaches to them so clear, that there can be no delay. The atmosphere of briskness that pervades the station every morning and evening in itself forbids it. Those who use the station are infected with the spirit of promptitude.”

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poe BEEN

PEON rt a. Oe ie ee? in fom ei ci ped bebe coe. DIS Ban eco

cei een ae ee a ee ho Bae ee ge gy tte ot vee ao ee

aooeAy A~SY eetaees wk we pret sy ee ee 4wee Oe te eg aOe . i siplie’ mea TAF Ata i: ae | gaa Me Ee te ie ANN 4 :Sa a .eee: ae ein- ting, i Be -F"Ay. Praaeye “Pid ie per aS : eo Te

‘Under the clocks’ at Flinders Street Station was Melbourne's most popular meeting place between the Wars. A four-faced tower clock terminates the view down Swanston Street (right) while pedestrians and tram-travellers hurrying down Swanston street may check the departure time of their train on the row of indicator clocks immediately above the

main entrance. (Public Transport Corporation) 62

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The spectacle of great masses of human beings moving, unconsciously it seemed, in obedience to the pulse of an unseen clock, inspired contemporaries with a mingled sense of awe and melancholy. Awe, because it reminded them of how nearly the man-made regular-

ity of the city had simulated the God-ordained calendar of nature. Melancholy, because they continued to yearn for that sense of spontaneity and danger that the railway and its timetable had all but eliminated from the everyday life of the city. John Hughes, who travelled each day from his home in Prahran to the city office of a mining company, was a representative of the new type of clock-conscious commuter created by the railway boom of the

1880s. His hours of work were neither onerous nor uniform. Sometimes he did not arrive in his office until ten or eleven in the morning, and he often left by three or four. But he religiously noted his times of arrival and departure and kept a daily tally of the miles he travelled in his diary. ‘I went to the city by my usual train 10 a.m., where I staid in office up to 3 p.m. at my labours, thence home and rested the evening (10 miles)’ was a typical entry. The monotony of his daily round sometimes got him down. ‘All things seem the same,’

he observed one autumn evening. ‘The same routine at office, the train, the people. When will it change?’ He day-dreamed of the time when his mining speculations would make him rich and he could escape the tyranny of the timetable as a gentleman of leisure.” Beyond the cities, where the railway clock and timetable had yet to extend their sway, timekeeping remained a hazardous affair. some towns appear to have kept their own solar time, independently of the capital cities. A Melburnian sending a telegram could consult a table in the almanac to discover the difference in time in Warrnambool (10

minutes later), Grafton (32 minutes earlier), Fremantle (1 hour 57 minutes later), or Launceston (8 minutes earlier). Other towns struggled to keep any reliable standard of time at all.* ‘It was difficult ... to

fix the right time in country towns,’ remarked the editor of the Coleraine Albion in 1888 after the local post office clock broke down

and the authorities cancelled the maintenance contract.” In Queensland, where three separate railway systems terminated in the coastal centres of Brisbane, Rockhampton and Townsville, the towns along their routes kept three different standards of railway time. The people of Broken Hill, which lay administratively within New South Wales, but was linked by rail to Adelaide, were obliged to observe three standards of time: New South Wales time when they posted a letter, South Australian time when they caught the train, and local 63

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE : DIFFERENCE OF TIME BETWEEN MELBOURNE AND THE OTHER |

PLACES MENTIONED. |

USEFUL FOR TELEGRAPHIC PURPOSES. !

Adelaide, 26m. later Glenelg, 25m. later Port Albert, 7m. earlier | Albury, 8m. earlier Grafton, 32m. earlier Port Augusta, 29m. later | Berlin, 8h. 46m. later Gympie, 31m. earlier Port Elliot, 25m. later Bourke, 4m. earlier Hobart, 9m. earher Port Macquarie, 32m. earlier Brisbane, 32m. earlier Ipswich, 31m. earlier Port Pirie, 28m. later Cape Otway, 5m. later Keppel Bay, 25m. earlier Port Stephens, 29m. carlier

Cape Schanck, same Launceston, 8m. earlier * Port Victoria, 30m. later !

Circular Head, 1m. earlier London, 9h. 40m. later Rockhampton 23m. earlier !

Clarence River Heads, 388m. Mackay, 18m. earlier San Francisco, 6h. 11m. earlier | earlier Maryborough, 31m earlier Sucz, 7h. 30m. later | Cooktown, 1m. earlier Newcastle, 27m. earlier Syducy, 25m. earher Deniliquin, Im. earlier New York, 9h. 24m. earlier Toowoomba, 26m. earlier

Dubbo, 15m. earlier Paris, 9h. 30m. later Townsville, 8m. earlier |

Eden, 20m. earlier Perth, lh. 57m. later Wallaroo, 29m. later ! Fremantle, 1h. 57m. later Portland, 14m. later Warrnambool, 10m. later |

Gawler Town, 25m. later Port Adelaide, 26m. later : Until the enactment of Standard Time in 1895 abolished such local variations, senders | of telegraphs could consult this table in Smith’s Almanac to compare times at their places :

of origin and destination. (La Trobe Library) ,

time when they began work at the mines. In Bowen, south of | Townsville but off the main rail, there were moves to install a town

hall clock with a bell that could be heard all over the town. | Meanwhile arrangements were made for a 64-pound gun—less ear- :

splitting than Professor Wilson’s howitzer—to be fired every i Saturday at one o’clock. How much effect a weekly salvo had upon |

the punctuality of the sleepy tropical town is open to doubt. None of | the three clockmakers who had set up business there had been able !

to make a go of it. ‘It appears that the clocks and watches are so | small in number here that a skilled workman cannot earn a living,’ |

the local newspaper mournfully concluded. : Even after the official adoption of standard time in eastern : Australia, temporal confusion persisted in remote parts of the coun- | try. In 1897 Charles Deland, a miner at Menzies, near Kalgoorlie on | the Western Australian goldfields, was surprised, when he arrived at :

church, to find the preacher winding up his sermon. ‘This,’ he | explained to his fiancée, ‘is accounted for by the various times we use | here.’

The post office time is usually 40 minutes behind town time & mine .

64 ,

time is just between the two. I went to church by town time and

found they had started by the Post Office time. The irregularity is | because of the mine being taken from the sun & post office time |

from the Perth time.” |

TIME CONQUERS SPACE

The contrast between city and country was a contrast between two different time-regimes. Country folk have long been considered less time-driven than city people, yet there may have been special reasons, in the uneven diffusion of the new technology of timekeeping in late nineteenth-century Australia, for the attention which contemporary

writers gave to images of time in their depictions of city and bush. ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s famous ‘Clancy of the Overflow’ compares the clock-driven ‘rush and nervous haste’ of the Sydney office-worker with the more leisurely seasonal rhythms of the drover. “Townsfolk,’ he tells us, ‘have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.’ The

drover in another of Paterson’s poems inhabits ‘the land of lots o’ time’. Henry Lawson’s gloomy vision of the city is likewise undergirt

by his sense of ‘the March of Time’. In ‘Faces in the Street’, the waves of human faces rush past ‘in the fear of being late’ and in his semi-autobiographical sketch, ‘Arvie Aspinall’s Alarm Clock’, that fear is tragically realised when the alarm clock rings and Arvie, a sickly factory lad, worn out by the fatigue and anxiety of keeping his early morning appointment at Grinder Brothers factory, fails to wake because he has died in his sleep. Steele Rudd, that great humorist of

bush life, presents the difference between city and country in the contrasting attitudes to time of the free selectors, Dad and Dave, and their cousins up from the city. Dad astounds the townsfolk by not meeting them at the train and not knowing what day it is. When Dad himself goes to town, to the nearby city of Ipswich, he stands wonderingly beneath the post office clock as it slowly strikes the hour.*

Portable Time By the early 1880s some observers suspected that church bells and

public clocks were becoming obsolete. In 1884 the celebrated Melbourne journalist the ‘Vagabond’ visited Bright, an isolated town in Victoria’s Ovens Valley, famous in those days for its church bells. Bright’s bells failed to impress the ‘Vagabond’. ‘In this country where everyman has a watch and every house 2 or 3 clocks, I think church bells should not be allowed, unless musical,’ he declared.“* Musical

or not, the great limitation of public clocks or bells, however big, bright or audible they might be, was their immobility. Perhaps the greatest step towards the development of a more synchronised soci-

ety in the later nineteenth century, therefore, came with the increased portability of time brought about by the dissemination of 65

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE : household clocks and, especially, by the advent of the cheap, massproduced pocket watch. Watches were not only useful instruments, they were potent status

symbols. Until the late nineteenth century, most watches were hand-made, with the high cost and variable accuracy that this implied. In the late 1870s a good Swiss or English lever watch sold in the colonies for about twenty to twenty-five pounds, or approximately

six to eight weeks’ work for a skilled tradesman. A cheaper, but necessarily less accurate, model might cost around half this amount. As the most valuable and saleable item of personal attire, the pocket

watch was a favourite target for thieves and pickpockets and a common article of pawn.* When the Scottish immigrant James Arnot | arrived in Melbourne in 1852, he observed that ‘Good prices are

goldfields. ! given for watches’. He decided forthwith to offer his own

instrument for sale in order to bankroll his planned expedition to the

In the 1870s the price of punctuality began to fall. The American | Civil War had created a new market for cheap, sturdy and reliable

pocket watches (every Union soldier was issued with one). Travellers on the rapidly expanding American railway system likewise required

a means of checking the time against the complicated system of

timetables and services. These were the circumstances which , provided the incentive for the American Watch Company of Waltham, Massachusetts to begin its revolutionary experiments in mass production. New England, the first region to adopt a system of | uniform railway time, also popularised the means of making it work. | Through the standardised and highly accurate manufacture of inter- | changeable parts, the American Watch Company was able simultaneously to multiply production levels, improve standards of accuracy

and dramatically reduce costs. A standard Waltham watch sold in Australia for three to four guineas, or less than half the price of its English or Swiss competitor. It was also more accurate, sturdier and

easier to use.” |

In 1879 a Waltham watch exhibited at the Sydney International Exhibition won a special gold medal, beating its competitors, includ- | ing a number of the leading Swiss and English firms, for accuracy, workmanship and design as well as economy and cost. The chairman of the judging panel, the New South Wales Government Astronomer,

who had carried out chronometric tests on all the entries at the Sydney Observatory, immediately perceived the democratic implications of the new device:

66

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The introduction of so much that is novel in machinery and economic in the processes of execution, if applied and confined to the manufacture of watches of many complications, would not be considered of any materially great advantage to the human family; but if applied to a simple form of construction which could be made to perform as well as, or better than the more complicated and less durable systems or styles of watches, it would then result that what had been a luxury only within the reach of the rich would be equally within the reach of all, both rich and poor.”

The company established a branch agency in Sydney and began a vigorous advertising campaign, especially in weekly newspapers with a strong rural readership, such as the Town and Country Journal and the Australasian. Word of its success flowed back to the company’s headquarters in Massachusetts. ‘In the English colonies, and especially in Australia and New Zealand, we have gained considerably and are

getting a firm footing,’ the Company Treasurer reported in 1880.“ Inconsistencies in the presentation of both American and Australian official statistics make it difficult to measure the dimensions of the trade precisely, but between the late 1870s and the late 1880s the value of watches and watch parts exported from the United States to Australia appears to have grown from less than one thousand dollars to more than 60000 dollars a year.*

The techniques of mass production pioneered by the American Watch Company were swiftly emulated by other American companies, and by the late 1880s the competition, even in Australia, had become so intense that the Waltham company, which had dominated

the trade five years earlier, was obliged to close down its Sydney branch.” Within a few years of its foundation in 1878, the Waterbury Watch Company of Connecticut had made further radical improvements in efficiency, economy and merchandising. The Waterbury watch required less frequent winding and sold in Australia for as little as 13s. 6d., or one-fifth the price of a Waltham watch.*!

With the new timepieces came the entire paraphernalia of American advertising with its colour posters, time-payment plans and

catchy jingles. The watch promoters both responded to and reinforced a heightened consciousness of time and time-measurement throughout the society: In nothing is the march of the world’s progress more noticeable than in the increased and increasing value of time ... We cannot 67

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE | suppose that Robinson Crusoe’s time or that of his man Friday | could have been of much importance while on the island of Juan | Fernandez. But in these hurrying days the merchant on his railroad | train, the coachman in the stable and the schoolboy at his lessons |

need accurately the time o’day, and need a good watch to tell it. | The poorest economy is to have a poor watch. The wisest economy |

of watch money is to get a WALTHAM.” |

Pocket watches were promoted, not only for their usefulness but for their status symbolism and even, it would seem, for their sex-appeal:

Charles Henry Augustus, a young man quite nice, :

Wore a patent chronometer of exceeding great price; ,

He wore it at morning, at midday, and night, :

But for some unknown reason it never was right. | Then the sweet Arabella unto him did say, If you love me, Charles Henry, give that thing away;

And however you travel, by train, coaches, or yachts, | Just take my straight tip—Wear a Waterbury Watch. |

And he took her advice, and he won her fair hand, :

And no happier couple lives in this fair land; |

They are always on time, and ne’er make a botch, |

For they go through the world by the Waterbury Watch.” | By the end of the 1880s, the success of the Americans’ advertising 3

Campaign was apparent in the fobs and chains appearing on the | waistcoats of Australia’s workingmen. Contemporary photographs . confirm their increasing popularity. Railwaymen and tram drivers | carried watches as tools of trade, clerks and businessmen as items of | smart attire. Few manual labourers wore a watch at work, unless the ) work itself called for it, for even the more robust American watches could be damaged in the course of strenuous labour. ‘It is the timekeeper, or the overseer, who puts on the labour, who takes out his watch and notes the time, and we rely on it,’ a Sydney wharf labourer ,

remarked.” But on high days and holidays, when he donned his best ! suit, and joined his fellows at a trade union picnic, or took his family ! on an outing, he would also be likely to wear, next to his breast, this | special badge of the self-regulated, provident, punctual workingman. ,

68 ,

In 1888, when the Adelaide horsecollar-maker and rising trade |

TEX, oT T 1 caSPACE ‘ / “rT LIME BI CONQUERS

:: FBS WaYLeYY ( RN Ai OL. apa CHT |

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4 t I LA} ee ae Tae od ok ie rn weet un esis) sim N HS) . Hat OD nt, y poo — - Seal :

: Annick wind ocaiyerand Nicke) | i. ‘WG N pee [yex = + a: ote i i me } aA i beoan iXt:?:i Ss

Cheapness and accuracy, combined with a vigorous advertising campaign, enabled American manufacturers like the Waterbury Watch Company of Connecticut to bring reliable timepieces within the reach of everyman, if not of everywoman. (Troedel Collection, La Trobe Library)

69

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unionist Fred Coneybeer took a long holiday in order to show his wife the Centennial Exhibition, he made a special point of collecting his pocket watch from the repairer before boarding the Melbourne

train. As far as we know, Maggie, his wife, did not own her own watch. Few Australian women probably did, although by the 1880s | manufacturers were making vigorous efforts to popularise ladies’ watches. They were traditionally smaller and more ornate than gen- | tlemen’s watches and were usually worn on a chain or ribbon around

the lady’s neck or inserted in a special pocket in the bodice of her | costume. (Such pockets are sometimes to be observed in the dresses of older middle-class women preserved in the costume collections of

museums.) Their comparative rarity in photographs of the period seems to confirm that watch-owning remained a largely male affair at least until the end of the nineteenth century.

The pocket watch was an instrument for negotiating the predominantly male sphere of work, travel and public life and hence symbolised male independence and mobility. Women, according to contemporary belief, were the steady, unmoving centre of family life. | They necessarily inhabited a narrower sphere than men and their lives were primarily regulated by the rhythms of the household and

the garden. The well-trained housewife certainly observed the discipline of her kitchen clock; but when she ventured outside the family home, she relied on the guidance of her husband and the timekeeping of his pocket watch.

So powerful was the symbolism of the watch that the desire for possession could undermine the very prosperity that it symbolised. | William Farrell was a casual labourer in Melbourne’s railway yards and earned only a little over two pounds a week. In February 1890 he made the first down-payment on a thirty-shilling Albert watch. ‘I won-

der how I will get on with them [the payments], he confided in his diary. A few weeks later the Maritime Strike began, and he was abruptly thrown out of work. But he kept up the payments, even though he had to pawn some of his clothes to raise the cash.”

Standard Time Sunday the first of February 1895 was a busy night for Australian | clockmakers and a bewildering one for many citizens. As the midnight hour struck, clocks all over New South Wales were suddenly stopped, their hands frozen, as time itself seemingly stood still. Five 70

TIME CONQUERS SPACE

full minutes passed before Sydney’s Post Office clock again resumed its steady ticking. In Adelaide, the clocks stopped even longer—four-

teen minutes and twenty seconds—causing some folk to wonder which day, Sunday or Monday, should be credited with any births or

deaths occurring during the interval. The minutes mysteriously gained by Sydney and Adelaide came at the expense of their southern neighbours, Melbourne and Hobart. The four illuminated faces of Melbourne’s Post Office clock, dimmed for several years as an econ-

omy measure, were lit again so that citizens could witness the strange transaction. At twenty minutes to twelve, the hands swept forward to midnight and the clock began to chime the hour.” The nation’s clocks were changing as Australia made the momen-

tous transition from a system of local time, based mainly upon the sidereal time of the capital cities, to the international system of standard hourly time zones for eastern, central and western Australia. Most of the colonies had previously followed their own times, based principally upon the times of their capital cities as set at the local observatory. Now the colonial legislatures had decreed that the eastern colonies should henceforth follow the time set by the 150th

meridian, South Australia the time of the 135th meridian and Western Australia the time of the 120th meridian east of Greenwich. By the morning of the second of February only Western Australia had still to put the new scheme into operation.” The Australian colonies were amongst the last English-speaking countries to adopt the new system of time. In England, as we have seen, Greenwich Mean Time had been adopted as the national standard of time by railways as early as the 1840s.” In the United States, with its thousands of fiercely independent small towns and dozens of equally independent private railways spread across a huge land mass, travellers in the 1860s and 1870s had faced a bewildering array of local times and company timetables. In St Louis, for example, where trunk railways converged from north, south, east and west, station clocks once showed no fewer than fourteen different times. The first moves toward standardisation occurred in New England in the late

1840s but it was not until 1883 that the main companies met in Chicago to adopt a system of hourly time zones for the eastern, cen-

tral, mountain and western states. In Europe the new system advanced more slowly, largely because of the reluctance of the jeal-

ous nation-states—the French especially—to accept the British Greenwich Mean Time as the international standard.” In Australia, by comparison, there was less to encourage, as well 71

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

as less to impede, the adoption of standard time. Most of the population clustered in the coastal cities and their immediate hinterlands, and were linked to the metropolis by centralised systems of government-owned railways and telegraphs. Only in a few remote border districts like Broken Hill had Australians experienced temporal confusion on the American scale. As telegraphs and railways linked the colonies, and the colonies themselves were linked with Europe by under-sea cable, there developed a greater need for the synchronisation of times and timetables. Appropriately, it was Sir Charles Todd, the builder of the Overland Telegraph, who, in his role as South Australian Postmaster-General and Superintendent of Telegraphs, became the leading Australian

advocate of standard time. Todd had corresponded with the Canadian railway builder Sandford Fleming, who had played a leading role in the promotion of standard time both in North America and

Europe, and was largely responsible for the definition of a Prime Meridian (or International Date Line) in the Pacific Ocean. (The two

men met, probably for the first time, in November 1893 during Fleming’s visit to Adelaide.) Behind their shared enthusiasm for standard time lay a common faith in the values of scientific rationality, economic progress and British imperialism.” The first serious proposal for Australian standard time came in the form of a paper inspired by Fleming’s Canadian system of uniform

time zones which Todd presented to the Intercolonial Postal Conference in Sydney in 1891. The delegates were sufficiently impressed with Todd’s paper to pass a motion supporting the ‘desirableness of adopting one uniform standard time throughout South

Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland (those Colonies being connected by railway), and also through Tasmania’,

but they deferred a final decision until the postal, railway and scientific authorities of the several colonies had been given a chance to comment on the proposal.” The notion that the whole of Australia could be governed by a single uniform time, based on the 135th meridian, was a departure from the principles of Fleming’s Canadian scheme and may have reflected a chauvinistic desire on Todd’s part to make South Australia, through

which the meridian passed, the temporal standard for all the colonies. The strongest criticisms of Todd’s proposal, when it was next debated at the 1893 Conference, came from the Queensland Postmaster-General, W. H. Wilson, who objected to the adoption of a standard that would require such a large difference between sidereal 72

TIME CONQUERS SPACE

and standard time in the outlying colonies such as Western Australia

and Queensland. In Brisbane, for example, the difference was an hour and twelve minutes. (Privately, Todd attributed the opposition of the Queensland government to the mischievous influence of that colony’s young Surveyor-General, Clement Wragge, who had already

incurred Todd’s wrath for allegedly presenting himself as ‘the Australasian meteorological czar’ at the 1891 Munich Meteorological

Congress.™) In Todd’s view, any inconvenience suffered by the Queenslanders was ‘more imaginary than real’. “The name we give to

an hour is not of much consequence,’ he declared. ‘What we do in practical life is to adapt our movements to the duration of daylight.’ Brisbane office-workers could start work at eight, while those in Perth could start at ten. But although scientific men might concede the relativity of time, politicians and the public were more reluctant to legislate it, and it was eventually Wilson’s less radical proposal to divide Australia into three one-hourly time zones which won the support of the Conference.” The Standard of Time Bill, enacting this proposal, passed through all the colonial parliaments without amendment and almost without debate. ‘This is not legislation in an experimental direction,’ W. H. Wilson assured the Queensland Legislative Assembly.® Only two or three denizens of that home of lost causes the Victorian Legislative Council opposed the Bill. It was but ‘a fad on the part of a few scientific men’, declared the businessman F. S. Grimwade. He objected to the adoption of ‘an artificial standard of time’. “The birds of the air were

all guided by the sun, and this was the only natural way of dealing with time,’ agreed David Melville. Some elderly members deplored the imagined threat to the habits of a lifetime. If a man wanted breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning, as had been his habit, he would not get it until twenty past eight [said Grimwade]. He resented the idea of being told every day of his life that if he wanted to rise at a certain time he must, as it were, act an untruth.

But surely, another member objected, he would have to ‘act an untruth’ if he journeyed to Portland where the locals were already on

Melbourne time. ‘I would rather stay in Melbourne than do that,’ Grimwade obstinately replied.” Most contemporaries were quicker than these dinosaurs to appre-

ciate the advantages of a system of ‘artificial’ time. Yet they also 73

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

recognised its significance as a symbol of the gradual synchronisation of Australian society. The Melbourne Avgus, for example, saw it

as a ‘vivid token of the unifying influence which science is exerting | upon the human race’.® Others hailed it as a harbinger of the coming

political federation of the colonies. But to most observers standard | time was primarily an economic question, and its adoption reflected | the gradual permeation of colonial society by that thrifty, rationalistic attitude to time which was the essence of modern commerce. “The question of time,’ remarked Wilson, is very important to the whole community and to business people especially, since railway and telegraphic communication have

brought us so close together. In olden days it did not very much : matter, but as times have advanced things have changed, and we : count time by seconds, and it is very desirable that no difficulty

should arise in connection with the exact time, so as to interfere with our business.”

Notes Library. ! The introduction of standard time was as uncontroversial as it was only because its passage had been so well prepared by the gradual permeation of colonial society by clock-based timetables and routines,

not only in business, but in domestic and recreational life as well. :

1 Journal of Mark Nicholson, 23 February 1840, MS 12285, La Trobe Library. |

2 Journal of Rev. Joseph Docker, 29 June, 5 August 1828, MS 9115, La Trobe

3 Oliver Macdonagh, A Pattern of Government Growth: The Passenger Acts and ,

their Enforcement, London 1961, pp. 280, 296. ,

4 Diary of Anne Gratton, 12 June 1858, MS 9367, La Trobe Library.

> Helen Woolcock, Rites of Passage: Emigration to Australia in the Nineteenth | Century, London 1986, pp. 101-2.

6 Edward Wilson to Fred (surname unknown), 12 January 1853, Wilson Papers, . Australian National Library. 7 Diary of Josephine Docker, 22 September 1855, Docker Papers, MS 9117, La Trobe Library.

8 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, London 1977, ch. 3. ,

9 Henry Lawson, “The Roaring Days’ (18897). | 10 William Foster, ‘Hartley-—Gateway to the West’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 18, part 4, 1932, pp. 221-6; John Rae, Report , on the Construction and Progress of the Railways of New South Wales from 74

TIME CONQUERS SPACE 1866 to 1871 Inclusive, Votes and Proceedings of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales, vol. 2, 1872-73, no. 324A, pp. 25-6, and see Robert Lee, The Greatest Public Work: The New South Wales Railways—1848 to 1889, Sydney 1988, p. 155.

11 Dionysius Lardner, The Electric Telegraph, new edition by Edward Bright, London 1867, p. 5. 12 Lardner, p. 248. 13 Nigel Thrift, ‘Owners’ Time and Own Time: The Making of a Capitalist Time Consciousness 1300-1800’, in Alan Pred (ed.), Space and Time in Geography, London 1981, pp. 69-75 documents this process. 14 P. D. Curnow, “The Boundaries of Victoria’, Australian Surveyor, vol. 32, no. 3, September 1984, p. 200.

15 The working of the block system on the Victorian Railways is explained in Handbook of the Rules and Regulations ... of the Telegraph Branch of the Victorian Railways, Melbourne 1890, p. 52.

16 Compare the experience of the American railways as described in Ian Bartky, ‘The Adoption of Standard Time’, Technology and Culture, vol. 30, January 1989, pp. 32-3. Also see Michael O’Malley, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time, New York 1990, ch. 2. 17 J. David Lewis and Andrew J. Weigert, ‘The Structures and Meanings of Social Time’, Social Forces, vol. 60, no. 2, December 1981, pp. 432-62. 18 Based on an analysis of entries in Bradshaw’s Victorian Directory, 1860, 1870, 1880, 1890.

19 For details of the expansion of the colonial telegraph system, see Ann Moyal, Clear Across Australia: A History of Telecommunications, Melbourne 1984. 20 J. Russell, ‘Electricity and Railway Work’, Victorian Electrical and Telegraphic Journal, December 1887, p. 37.

21 K. L. Murray, Presidential Address, Victorian Electrical and Telegraphic Journal, July 1889, p. 151. 22 B. P. Sellor to Public Service Board Investigation into the Working of the Sydney Observatory (1909), question 277, AONSW 8/424. 23 “Time, clocks, watches, etc.’ from The New Telegraphic Handbook, ibid., April 1891, pp. 49-50; New South Wales Government Railways, Rules and Regulations for the Conduct of Traffic and for the Guidance of Officers and Men, Sydney 1907, p. 19. 24 Andrew Lemon, A History of Australian Thoroughbred Racing, vol. 2, 1862-1939, Melbourne 1990, p. 309.

25 Popular Guide to the Centennial Exhibition, Melbourne 1888, pp. 30-1. 26 Rae Francis, ‘The Politics of Work: Case Studies of Three Victorian Industries, 1880-1939’, PhD thesis, Monash University 1988, pp. 346-7; and see below ch. IV. 27 The letters are from Susannah Mapleson (ed.), A Lifetime of Letters, Drouin 1981, pp. 21, 25, 27.

28 Based on various accounts in the Melbourne Argus between September and November 1871.

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29 E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen (1872) as quoted in K. S. Inglis, The Imperial Connection: Telegraphic Communication between England and Australia, 1872-1902’ in A. F. Madden and W. H. Morris-Jones (eds), Australia and Britain: Studies in a Changing Relationship, Sydney 1980, p. 22. 30 Inglis, pp. 23-7. 31 Select Committee on Telegraphic Communication, New South Wales Votes and Proceedings, vol. 2, no. 199a, 1872-73, p. 4. 32 Reproduced in Paul K. Hatt and Albert J. Reiss (eds), Citzes and Society, New York 1957, p. 638. 33 Bradshaw’s Australian Railways Guide, Melbourne 1856. 34 Hackney Cab Committee, Melbourne City Council, 1879, Melbourne City Council Archives. 35 Illustrated Australian News, 13 May 1882, p. 74.

36 I owe this information to Norm Maddock and Jack Cranston of the Tramways Association of Australia. 37 ‘A Human Tide’, Avgus, 21 January 1910.

38 Diary of John Hughes, 23-27 March 1888, MS 10718, La Trobe Library. For a discussion of Hughes’ life see Davison, McCarty and McLeary (eds), Australians 1888, pp. 220-6 and for extracts from the diary, Australia 1888, no. 7, April 1981, pp. 94-6. 39 This table appeared in only some almanacs, notably Dr. L. L. Smith’s Medical Almanac and Massina’s Almanac, in both cases from the early 1880s to 1895 and the adoption of Australian Standard Time. Other almanacs published another table of the differences between the times of sunrise and sunset in Melbourne (or Sydney) and the other principal towns of Australasia, mainly the capital cities. How far the publication of these tables can be accepted as proof of the survival of local timekeeping is still a matter for conjecture. 40 Albion, 26 October, 7 December; also see Donald Times, 18 September 1888. 41 Port Denison Times, 7, 14 April 1888.

42 Charles Deland to Effie Wylie, 9 May 1897 in Michael R. Best (ed.), A Lost Glitter: Letters between South Australia and the Western Australian Goldftelds 1895-1897, Netley, S.A. 1986, p. 168. 43 The Steele Rudd stories are ‘Two Girls from Town’ in Sandy’s Selection (1904) and ‘Dad and Casey’ in Our New Selection (1903).

44 Michael Cannon (ed.), Vagabond Country: Australian Bush and Town Life in the Victorian Age, Melbourne 1981, p. 16.

45 Estimate based on prices shown in advertising columns of Australasian and Town and Country Journal in the late 1870s. 46 Victor S. Clark, A History of Manufactures in the United States, New York 1929, vol. 2, pp. 135-6; Albert S. Bolles, Industrial History of the United States, Norwich, Conn. 1881, p. 230; Vincent P. Carosso, “The Waltham Watch Company: A Case History’, Bulletin of the Business Historical Association, vol. 23, December 1949, pp. 165-87; David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, Cambridge, Mass. 1983, pp. 308-20.

76

TIME CONQUERS SPACE 47 Official Record of the Sydney International Exhibition, 1879, Sydney 1881, pp. 411-14.

48 Treasurer’s Report, February 1880, AD-2, Waltham Watch Company Papers, Baker Library, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, Mass.

49 Colonial import figures make no distinction between clocks and watches and, although US official export statistics do make the distinction from the mid 1870s, there are such large and inexplicable variations in the value of exports to Australasia that it is difficult to be confident that the distinction was being made consistently. Between the mid 1870s and the late 1880s the combined value of clocks and watches exported from the US to Australasia increased approximately threefold, but watches, which comprised only a tiny fraction of the trade in the late 1870s, grew to almost 40 per cent in the late 1880s. See Commerce and Navigation of the United States, 1875-1900. Since the price of watches was steadily declining over the period, the increase in the value of exports obviously understates the increase in the number of watches. As an illustration of the increase in the volume of watch production within the US, the Waltham Company’s production increased from 49243 movements in 1875 to 413290 in 1890. See Papers of C. W. Moore, vol. 2A-1, Baker Library. In 1891 the Australasian colonies were, next to the UK, the largest importers of American watches. 50 Waltham Watch Company, Treasurer’s Report, February 1888, AD-2.

ol Homer F. Bassett, Waterbury and Her Industries, Gardner, Mass., 1889, pp. 23-4; Joseph Anderson (ed.), The Town and City of Waterbury ... New Haven 1896, p. 399; and on the impact of watches on the American market see O’Malley, Keeping Watch, ch. 4. 52 Waltham Company Scrapbook (c. 1891), TE 1, Waltham Watch Company Papers, Baker Library. 93 Town and Country Journal, 22 December 1888. 54 R. McKillop to Royal Commission on Strikes, Sydney 1891, questions 693, 982; also see the general account of timekeeping in relation to labour in Graeme Davison, ‘Capital Cities’ in Australians 1888, pp. 189-227. 99 Diary of William Farrell, 2, 9, 16, 22 March 1890, LaTrobe Library. 06 Sydney Morning Herald, 31 Jan., 2 Feb. 1895; Register, 31 Jan. 1895; Age, 31 Jan. 1895; Argus, 1 Feb. 1895.

57 In 1898 South Australia changed from a time based on the 135th meridian to 142° 3’, putting it half an hour, rather than one hour, behind Eastern Standard Time. As travellers on the Eyre Highway will be aware, Central Western Time, 45 minutes in advance of Perth Time, and 45 minutes behind Adelaide Time, is used as the standard along that section of the highway between Ceduna and Eucla. 58 Thrift, ‘Owners’ Time and Own Time, pp. 69-76. 59 Carlene Stephens, “The Most Reliable Time”: William Bond, the New England Railroads, and Time Awareness in 19th Century America’, Technology and Culture, vol. 30, Jan. 1989, pp. 1-24; Ian Bartky, “The Adoption of Standard Time’, ibid., pp. 25-56; Eviatar Zerubavel, ‘The Standardization of Time: A Sociological Perspective’, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 88, no. 1, July 1982, pp. 1-23; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York 1991, pp. 74-81; O’Malley, Keeping Watch, ch. 3.

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60 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, pp. 12-13. 61 See Sandford Fleming to Todd, 3 November 1893, Letters Received, Adelaide Observatory, GRG 31/2, Public Record Office of South Australia. 62 Laurence J. Burpee, Sandford Fleming, Empire Builder, London 1915, pp. 218-20.

63 Report of the Postal and Telegraph Conference held in Sydney, March 1891, Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP), vol. 3, no. 53, 1891, pp. 12, 21-3. 64 See Todd to R. H. Scott, 31 June 1891, Todd to W. H. Christie, 29 Nov. 1893, Letters Received, Adelaide Observatory. 65 Report of the Postal ... Conference ... in Brisbane, March 1893, New South Wales Legislative Assembly Votes and Proceedings, vol. 7, 1892-93, pp. 25-6;

Report of the Postal Conference in New Zealand, March 1894, South | Australian Parliamentary Papers, vol. 2, no. 70, 1894, pp. 25-6, Appendix 1. 66 Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. Ixxxi, 1894, p. 651. 67 Victorian Parliamentary Debates, vol. 76, 1894-95, pp. 1608-9, 1614. 68 Argus, 1 February 1895. 69 Queensland Parliamentary Debates, vol. lxxxi, 1894, p. 651.

78

Ul

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY ¢

B y the 1850s thegovernors fashion for church clocks andand bells, beloved of the early of New South Wales VansoDiemen’s Land, was all but extinct. The disappearance of the church clock did not mean that colonial Australians had been emancipated from the

rule of the clock. More likely it signified that, in a moral sense at least, clock-trme had become an internal, rather than a merely external, discipline. In many of the newer churches and chapels, such as those of the Methodists and Congregationalists, clocks were hung on the interior walls, perhaps as a convenience to the preacher as well as a symbol of the selfregulating punctuality that was an essential feature of their moral atmosphere. While penal society was regulated by the external disciplines of the public clock and bell, the free immigrants who came to dominate Australian society from the 1840s and 1850s were more likely to follow the internal clock of punctuality and ‘time-thrift’ instilled in them by preachers, schoolmasters, employers

and the many agencies of self-help and mutual improvement that flourished in the Victorian era. ‘Punctuality, writes David Landes, ‘comes from within, not from without.’ While clocks, bells, telegraphs and railways might diffuse

an awareness of time, it was only those who had learned to value Above: The mystical triple-S of Melbourne's Eight Hours Monument, dedicated in 1903, symbolised the allegiance of the trade union movement to the ideal of standardised hours of labour, recreation and rest. (Photo by Stmon Tranter) 79

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE | time and to order their lives by its demands who could be described | as punctual. Many immigrants, especially the skilled urbanised working classes who comprised the majority of the free unassisted immi-

grants of the 1850s, had probably learned the lesson of punctuality | before they arrived in Australia. They knew that time was a valuable commodity to be prudently saved and wisely spent. Time, as their

masters often reminded them, was money, and the techniques of | double-entry bookkeeping were as capable of being applied to the ! management of time as to the stewardship of money. In his popular book, SelfHelp, published in 1859, Samuel Smiles distilled the moral | lessons of the Industrial Revolution for his mainly working-class readers. |

Men of business are accustomed to quote the maxim that Time is : money; but it is more; the proper improvement of it is self-culture, self-improvement, and growth of character ... An economical use of time is the true mode of securing leisure: it enables us to get through business and carry it forward, instead of being driven by it.

On the other hand the miscalculation of time involves us in |

perpetual hurry, confusion, and difficulties; and life becomes a . mere shuffle of expedients, usually followed by disaster ... Lost : wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost | health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.’ , Smiles’ advice contained many of the principal elements of the mod- | ern philosophy of time-management: the concept of time as a com- . modity; the assumption—analogous to the belief of Victorian writers on wealth and poverty—that everyone had enough time for the task, ,

but only needed to manage it wisely; the belief that good time-man- |

agement would increase the knowledge, virtue and leisure of the | time-saver. Like a prudent artisan or a thrifty housewife, the good | time-manager would carefully garner the scraps of time. ‘With perse- | verance,’ Smiles wrote, ‘the very odds and ends of time may be

worked up into results of the greatest value.’ He showed how an | ambitious artisan might memorise mathematical formulae while pol- |

ishing a steam engine or use his evenings for self-improvement |

rather than squander them in dissipation. | When time became measurable, it also began to assume some of | the characteristics of other measurable things. The equation between | time and money, as Smiles perceived, is a misleading one, for we | cannot really own or hoard time in the same way that we can own or | hoard money. Nevertheless, it is on the basis of such equations that | 80

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

modern society has developed a complex economy of time with its own

ledgers and balance sheets. Now we can buy parking time—really a kind of street-rent. We can accumulate long-service leave—really an advance promise of a holiday. We may work flexitime, a contract to work a fixed number of hours according to our own schedule. We can buy into a time-share resort—really a kind of shared ownership. We can buy a product on time-payment or, more accurately, on hire-purchase. We can buy time-saving, or, more accurately, labour-saving

appliances.‘ It is this ability to deal with time as an abstract commodity—to count it, to move it around, to exchange it—that, as much as the development of a money economy, lies at the basis of modern life.

From the vantage point of the late twentieth century, when time-

management techniques have achieved the status of a science, Samuel Smiles’ advice may strike us as almost banal. The progressive rationalisation of time-management was so deeply implicated in the processes of colonisation and capitalistic development that the pursuit of punctuality may now seem like a cause that was simply bound to succeed. But contemporaries did not always regard it so, and throughout the later nineteenth century thrifty attitudes to time gained ground only as they overcame the moral and practical objections of people whose lives were still deeply bound up with other less rationalistic, but not necessarily irrational, time-regimes.

Punctuality, considered in the strict sense, is a social concept. While we can imagine an isolated individual timing the duration of activities by reference to a clock, there is no real compulsion to be punctual—that is, to observe other people’s clocks—except the need to co-ordinate our activities with those of others. The growing need for punctuality in late nineteenth-century society is thus, in part, an index of the multiplying webs of dependency which go with developed or

‘civilised’ life.’ At the heart of this process, argues the sociologist Norbert Elias, is the development of the state, which, in Australia as elsewhere, has generally assumed responsibility for promulgating and teaching standards of time. Personal habits of punctuality, as we now know, are not the only way of achieving this necessary co-ordination; in the late twentieth century, much of the burden of keeping time and co-ordinating people’s personal schedules has been shouldered by automated systems and electronic communications. But at the end of the nineteenth century, the prevailing methods of communication and the main forms of industrial production called for a high

degree of synchronisation between the schedules of travellers and message-senders, buyers and sellers, employers and workers. The 81

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

railway and the telegraph were both bipolar, rather than multipolar, forms of communication which required their users to observe precise schedules of operation. The basis of steam power was the centralisation of production. The most efficient factories and mines used large steam engines to drive many co-ordinated machines, and therefore required the factory operatives or miners to observe common times of starting and stopping work. It is common, especially among Marxist historians, to view timethrift as an instrument of social control, part of the process of conditioning by which working people were prepared for the strict workdisciplines of modern capitalism. Such interpretations are instructive, but only to a point. It is clear, from the evidence in the following pages, that elementary teachers—among the main propagators of time-thrift among the young—were promoting punctuality in places far removed from those where it might have been considered effi-

cient. They did so, not primarily as a means of habituating their pupils to the rhythms of factory life (only a relative few were destined for industrial labour), but more because they were applying the logic

of the factory to the process of learning. Furthermore, the practices of punctuality and time-thrift should not only be considered advantageous to efficiency-minded employers. Working people often took the initiative in instituting strict working hours as a way of limiting the competition between workers and the control of employers over their time. Time-thrift was a double-sided ideal, as capable of being

turned to the defence of working people’s interests as for their exploitation.

Cardboard Clocks and Distant Bells During the second half of the nineteenth century the colonial governments sponsored a sustained campaign to teach colonial Australians to tell the time. The main targets of this campaign were the country’s children and its main agents were the new government schools and their energetic schoolmasters and schoolmistresses.

The gold rushes were an exciting, but profoundly disturbing, episode in Australia’s history and, at their conclusion, many of the governing classes remained apprehensive about the ‘unsettled’ state of the country. The restless movement of people from place to place, their topsy-turvy fortunes, their thirst for novelty and change, their vehement demands for radical democracy, were seen as symptoms of 82

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

a kind of nervous instability in the character of the people. The belief was widespread that children raised in such a turbulent environment

would grow up ignorant and uncontrolled and, by the 1860s and 1870s, the growing numbers of street arabs and larrikins roaming the streets of the colonial cities seemed to confirm their fears.

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; fy. SS Le Ces ae , : ace ee, ||| a pt ea hall i)| | : a HLF (“lpOT ESS Ses TE RN |(| || i "Op ae aaTita' RL i : |AL ohi cee rrr a NA iy TE TE ee A i / i| | Me A en ET ea i oe iG es 1a i nha ii | We ) ‘|Ries RR RRR EA GM i :Nh He ant | i Be i : sat 4 | , ul Wee | Ae TTA 2 ART i [) | FE a ERG TET | |He = aay amitSX-K As WN yar il ini \ S = AK Nee WS ANGHS yesos . a Ey TY TO Mig,Gy Yj HY

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Raw uing FOES SD ag ae Ua :3 ue) [ pee ee WAYS YR a cag OSS SERS 4 G gps RO Se bye at DEH ANS TING ee a : 7-4 PEs y ts . on & ‘Ay oo OY K iY SN oh « Uy) WY OS No Sg Bs yo == ‘ \ . \ ‘7

EE) UMW © (MNS EE) WAQQQOTLS Straight lines and strict timetables established the framework of colonial schooling. In the crowded classroom of the Melbourne Orphan Asylum, a lone teacher keeps his pupils under a kind of military superintendence. The clock on the opposite wall ts visible to the teacher but not to his pupils. (National Library of Australia)

Compulsory education was introduced largely as an antidote to this disorder and the new state schools were designed to inculcate the social disciplines in which the community itself was apparently so deficient. ‘The fact is growing plain that something approaching a greed for personal violence and general boorishness is rising into 83

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE | unpleasant prominence among a section of society in which State education is directly interested,’ observed J. E. Elkington, one of the new Victorian school inspectors in 1874.°

The Australian public school was closely modelled on the schools

of the Irish national system and emulated many aspects of Irish cur- | riculum and practice, including its heavy emphasis upon the virtues of punctuality and time-thrift. In the regulations for the new National Schools established in Victoria in 1851, teachers were instructed ‘to

observe themselves and to impress upon the minds of their pupils, the great rule of regularity and order—A TIME FOR EVERYTHING, AND EVERYTHING IN ITS PLACE’.” They were required to keep a time book

recording their own times of arrival and departure, and were obliged

to plan their instruction around a written timetable. Frederick Gladman, Superintendent of the new Training Institution for teachers | established by the Victorian government in the 1870s, saw the ideal school as a paragon of ‘Punctuality, Order, Discipline, Method’.®

In the classroom, children were not only taught to tell the time, | but to follow the time-thrifty advice of Samuel Smiles. Almost as soon

as they had learned to read, infants were chanting the modern nursery rhyme, ‘What the Clock Says’: ‘Tick,’ the clock says, ‘tick, tick, tick,’ What you have to do, do quick, Time.ts gliding fast away; Let us act, and act today.’

As they learned to write, they painstakingly transcribed the proverbs that reminded them of their duty to the clock: ‘A stitch in time saves nine’; ‘Procrastination is the thief of time’. These were the ideals which colonial schoolmasters aimed to instil in their children and to uphold in their own organisation. Punctuality,

they believed, was both an aid to learning and a sign of the teacher’s

command over his pupils. Alas, few of Australia’s first government | schools were as punctual and regular as they were supposed to be. ‘The majority of teachers still, and apparently with reason, complain | of irregular and unpunctual attendance on the part of many of the | scholars,’ reported Captain L. Herbert Noyes from Castlemaine in 1874. ‘The irregularity of their attendance added to their want of | punctuality in coming to school in the morning precludes their deriv-

ing much advantage from the lessons given,’ complained John Sircom, one of the Melbourne inspectors." 84

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

Throughout the later nineteenth century, schoolteachers, especially in the countryside, fought a long and often unavailing campaign to impose standardised hours of schooling and habits of strict punctuality upon communities governed by different, though no less exacting, schedules of seasonal or casual labour. Many teachers soon learned

to adjust their timetables to the seasonal demands of the farming year, excusing their children altogether during the peak periods of shearing and harvesting, potato-digging and cherry-picking, and

exercising a certain latitude towards absentees and latecomers throughout the year. ‘In country districts the irregularity of attendance is greater than in the towns, and is often attributed to bad roads, the distance the children reside from the school, and the assistance which the parents derive from their work at certain seasons, observed an inspector in central Victoria. Lateness was a notorious

problem in dairying districts, where the children were obliged to help with milking before they set out for school."

—_—Seo 2 ty . dl f: —igogee, ‘ —a 3gin,

Le oo ee ae tase a aga aap, ee ‘en ( i gees ie | ecaaees Se re 2 ee ee peer tl | | Se ee ee eee Ct

cea SERED AG aT AEN py te ge as anergy , no cobb SALAH SR aH AS ERE ee ee Bell-cotes, like this handsome brick one on the Prahran State School, were a prominent architectural feature of colonial schools in an era when pupils learned to be punctual by heeding the summons of the school bell. (National Library of Australia)

In the city, school inspectors tended to take a dimmer view of lateness and irregular attendance, even though the pressure for children to absent themselves to help support their working-class families as outworkers, bootblacks, laundresses, stablehands and in other forms of casual work may have been just as great as in the countryside.” A

Melbourne school inspector who took a more sympathetic view of 85

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

the problem observed: ‘Children of eleven years of age, and upwards, can often in one day earn as much as will supply them with food for two or three, and, when parents are out of work, and their supply of food is insufficient, we cannot expect that they will refrain from availing themselves of their children’s labour.’” When the district inspector arrived at a school, he first consulted the teacher’s timetable, which had to be prominently displayed in the

schoolroom." Here, he believed, was the blueprint of a well-run school. It revealed the priorities the teacher gave to the various elements of curriculum—spelling, reading, arithmetic, writing, rhymes, nature study, moral instruction—and how they were integrated into the school day. It showed how the teachers managed the simultaneous instruction of the various grades and alternated various learning tasks, and periods of noisy and quiet activity—the art of what was known in the profession as ‘synchronism’. The construction of a good timetable, and success in keeping to it, were universally regarded as among the highest attributes of the good teacher. Conversely, nothing

so offended the district inspector as a poorly designed and badly observed timetable. “The non-observance of the timetable is attended with such mischievous results to the general working of the school

that it requires more than passing notice,’ observed Inspector Gilchrist in 1877.

Over the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Victorian school inspectors observed a steady improvement in the design and obser-

vance of school timetables. In the late 1870s an inspector of Melbourne schools estimated that about one-third of the schools gave unsatisfactory attention to the timetable. By the early 1880s, however, a country inspector reported that ‘year by year the timetables are of a more satisfactory character’, while another noted that

‘In nearly every case the time-table is strictly adhered to’. By the 1890s the battle appears to have been won, and it was rare for a district inspector to make critical comment on a school’s timetable. ‘Synchronism’—the orderly internal arrangement of the school day—was largely a matter of the organisational powers of the teacher; but punctuality—the linking of the school timetable to local time— also depended upon the available means of telling and broadcasting the time. In remote areas, it was not unusual for the schoolteacher to

conduct the school without direct reference to a clock at all. Few small schools were provided with clocks and their teachers, usually juniors on their first or second posting, were generally too poorly paid to be able to afford to buy one for themselves. ‘In these places,’ 86

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

an inspector observed in 1875, ‘time is a matter of very trifling importance, the only means of arriving at any idea of the hour arising from the whistle of a neighbouring mine or the passing of the mail boy. On

calling the attention of the teacher to his want of punctuality, or remonstrating with him on his gross indolence and neglect, I get the inevitable answer that it is only nine o’clock on the village clocks.”

Since the government demanded punctuality, it was only fair, some parents believed, that it should provide the means of achieving

it. In 1874 the Cabbage Tree Flat Board of Advice wrote to the Victorian Education Department requesting a clock for their school, but the plea was turned down with the explanation that in view of the ‘many claims of a more pressing character ... the Department cannot undertake to supply clocks’.”* Similarly, in 1869 the School Board at

Windeyer in western New South Wales petitioned the Council of Education for a bell, explaining that It is a matter of notoriety and complaint that the school children, owing to the absence of such a requisite, drop into the school at all hours. In fact, the morning may frequently be lost in collecting the children, most of whose parents reside in a scattered neighbourhood and are, besides, not provided with a time-piece of any kind. The school house occupies an extremely elevated position, and the sound produced by an ordinary bell suspended from its summit might readily be heard at a distance of at least two miles from the building.”

But again the petition was refused. Victorian schoolhouses built in the

last quarter of the century, especially the more imposing buildings erected in larger towns, often incorporated a picturesque bell-cote, or

even, as at Daylesford where the school stands on a picturesque eminence above the town, a prominent turret-clock.

A clock might enable the isolated schoolteacher to measure the passage of the hours, and a bell to signal the commencement of school to nearby families, but there remained the problem of synchronising his clock with ‘real’ time, or, at least, with whatever standard of time prevailed in the locality. Many teachers got around the problem by setting their clocks by whatever approximate standards

were at hand—the sun, the local mine, the mailboy’s arrival—and simply allowing a generous margin for late arrivals. The regulations in use in the early 1870s required teachers to offer at least four hours of instruction a day and to mark the roll no later than one hour before 87

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE | the break-up of class, but they prescribed no specific hour for the commencement or conclusion of the school day. Since their own pay | depended, in part, upon the numbers of regular attendances, teachers sometimes preferred to set their own clocks behind the local

standard, and hence to give twenty minutes grace to latecomers, ! rather than lose credit in the eyes of the authorities by marking too | many absences. The battle to improve punctuality was therefore | waged as much against lenient teachers as against careless pupils. In : the late 1870s the regulations were further tightened to bring the roll- | call forward to a minimum of two hours before the end of each session of school. Inspectors joined with teachers in renewed appeals to | the Education Department for the regular supply of clocks and bells.

‘Teachers are expected to keep to their time-tables, but when they | have no time-piece this is obviously impossible,’ observed Ross Cox :

from Castlemaine. | It would be a great advantage if all schools could be supplied with bells and clocks [agreed Richard Philp from Maryborough]. In most of the towns the schools have these things; but in the country |

places, where they are most needed, there is nothing of the kind. : The teachers and scholars are left to guess the time, and want of | punctuality and other irregularities arise in consequence. Besides |

the means of keeping the time when they have it, some method of | ascertaining the real time—such as a sundial—is much needed by | teachers in these out-of-the-way places. A short time ago I visited a | school in which the time was fully an hour before real time, to the manifest disadvantage of such children who lived at a distance from

the school, and had difficulty enough in reaching it, even by real . time, in order to get their mark for attendance. At another school in

the same neighbourhood I found the school time nearly an hour |

behind what it should be.” ! If the Department could not afford real clocks, then, it was argued, | it should at least issue a supply of cardboard clock-faces with mov- | able hands on which teachers could teach their children to tell the | time.'’? Despite the repeated pleas of its inspectors, the Education Department declined to supply clocks as a regular item of school |

88 |

equipment, or even to allow the cost to be deducted from the | teacher’s maintenance allowance. It evidently regarded them as |

essential items of personal equipment, much like suits and books, | which teachers should provide for themselves. By the mid 1880s, :

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

clockless schools began to be mentioned less frequently in inspectors’ reports. Mass production was making clocks and watches more affordable and more teachers were evidently able to provide for themselves. In 1891 one of the original complainants reported that ‘clocks are now more generally found than formerly’, although as late as 1900 an inspector in western Victoria noticed that ‘a few schools are without that very necessary article—a reliable clock’.” The need for a clock was more imperative than ever, for new regulations pub-

lished in the mid 1880s required schools to observe set hours of opening and closing. In less than a quarter of a century, Australia’s schools had become

firmly bound to the rule of the clock. The general principles of temporal organisation which they followed had been outlined as early as the 1850s, but it was only more gradually that they were put into practice. Probably the band of school inspectors, who had vigilantly

monitored the conduct of the colonies’ schools, rewarding the punctual and punishing the slack, considered themselves entitled to some of the credit. But it is impossible to distinguish their influence from the host of other factors—technological, cultural, economic and geographical—that combined to make the entire society more timeCONSCIOUS.

Some educational historians have seen in the pursuit of punctuality a manifestation of the determination of colonial authorities to habitu-

ate colonial children to the disciplines of an industrial society. According to this view, the bells, roll-calls, timetables, marching and drill of the elementary school were but a foretaste of the disciplines of the mine and factory.”' In fact, relatively few colonial children were

destined to work in large mechanised factories and many more would work on farms, in small workshops, on building sites and in shops, where more flexible work regimes were the norm. If schools were becoming more punctual, it was not in response to the disciplinary needs of colonial employers alone, but as part of a movement to reorder the whole of life—leisure as well as work, travel as well as domestic life—according to the rule of the clock.

Time and Work The establishment of regular, time-bound routines of work, so far from being an imposition by dictatorial employers, seems to have been a process in which many cultural agencies and social classes 89

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Pam Pa)

a ee Xe ayy gedey padee su . py eteutey cad capngaaspey ri co-operated. From anpyres earlyLevent stage,eushearing, the largest source ol rey ls 1 a + — ao wie " i. was y { aconducted a it wt (| ~ -on 7 i+ l 15 = ae ee! wage-labour inanny rural\ Australia, punctual lines. HOV ten TEP eenfrom Perceother >it ae cae epeely 2 | st ait— owe ane Shearing differs work in this wise: is “kk work against

time, remarked Rolf Boldrewood after a visit to the Riverina in 1865 1865. e, .combination a _ | . a? >of; competitive _ _— _ ; apiece-work an ; _? eywith - . Fg { ; schedule _j j ; 7 leof In its a fixed 1. i ar anthe rit ryorganisation £5 aor an a ‘ 77of ' t -the ~ il,shearing ry ran Fs “4day ws ,was Ly 4 a7 distinctively 7 ‘ ; ye j * hours,

A doe lia ©institution. wend dg adhe TI a | le . — t€ ; hen ; ij . ween ee omy . Australian the timetable in contemporary shearing agree;ments _ _ 4~ 7 = _ oo. ae as _ . a ae a L _ ayer = _ ; * a| follows a very similar pattern to the regulations laid down Uwe 4-23 aanearlier a. waft .for i i. wen aan - oa. 8 ]assigned me mt ce 7servants: py gen yenacae 7 >| |! generation convicts and six2.o'clock -adtevea ao tof ey cad end eg ae we oe ewe 2 oe a In.. . eee . start, breakfast at eight, resuine at nine, dinner between twelve— and one, and work until half an hour before sunset. leven in the absence of a master, and with the powerful incentive of gold, alluvial miners in the 1850s also seem to have fallen naturally 7 i Fa a oad - “leye- s=fargy dw routine, ; -, Sod oo mn a - tac a 7only 1 7 1 "ar | = ‘ >interruptions al ind * om -y into similar regular1. Sad daily modified byi the bad weather. Scottish immigrant JamesArnot Arnotmay may have have been bee of badofweather. The The Scotlish tmnugrant James > i srt NS 4 ig . ws + 1 iT) ra = cat ‘L, ry alt i + a . a 7 ' "5 < I. more self-disciplined than most (he resisted the temptation to sell]his cependedn wed en pepeancat Jae anaes n f4 vouaw In fie vqaaee : a, ee watch at a considerable profit when he first arrived in Melbourne), but his description of ‘the real diggers daily routine accords with the

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THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

Diggers take it easy, get begun by nine o’clock ... at twelve kindled a fire, boiled our coffee and enjoyed our dinner, set to again time about at it, only one in the hole at once ... at four o’clock got down 10 feet ... got home by five o’clock ... got a comfortable wash, and took a walk around the diggins ... *

Although each claim was an independent unit, miners working in close proximity seem to have followed similar routines. As the organ-

isation of mining became more complex, and the small gangs and syndicates of alluvial miners were succeeded by the large joint-stock companies of deep-lead miners, the temporal discipline of labour nec-

essarily became more codified. By the late 1850s the South Australian Mining Company, the first of the large mining firms, had hung a brass bell beside the engine house of its copper mine to signal the change of shifts to the nearby townsfolk of Burra. A decade later at Sandhurst (Bendigo), Victoria’s quartz-mining metropolis, the rhythm of daily life was delineated by the whistles of the mines as

they sounded the end of each shift at midnight, 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Only on the Sabbath were the whistles silent and did the miners cease their labours, although even then gangs sometimes continued to work below, repairing the drives and roadways.” Below ground, out of earshot of the bells and whistles that summoned them to the pithead, working miners were often obliged to resort to more primitive methods of time-telling, such as marking the slow melting of the candles by which they worked. The pattern of eight-hourly shifts, established on the mining fields in the 1850s, reinforced a broader movement to make eight hours the standard day’s work in colonial society. “The goldfields regulated the wages of the colony,’ remarked Mr Gleadell, a member of Sydney’s infant Eight Hour movement in 1856, explaining that under the buoyant conditions of the time many masons like himself could earn as much in eight hours as they formerly did in ten.” Like their fellows in Europe and North America, Australian workingmen supported shorter hours on moral and economic, rather than political, grounds.” But there may be special reasons why Australian workmen place such a high value on limited working hours. Work under the hot Australian sun was said to be more arduous than in more temperate climes and the prosperity of the country enabled employers to grant the privilege more easily than their counterparts in Britain.” Giving workingmen more time for study and mental improvement helped to make them more intelligent and more virtuous citizens.” Regular hours of 91

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE . labour created the framework for a more ordered and virtuous life | than the alternate cycles of drudgery and dissipation that were once | said to govern the lives of many workingmen. Defenders of the eight- | hour day claimed ‘that many persons who had previously to the | short-time movement sought the unhealthy excitements of the beer- , house and the bowling alley, now sought rational excitement in the | endearments of their families and in the reading-room’.” Their critics, however, suspected that not all the emancipated workingmen | would spend their increased leisure on ‘rational recreation’. ‘Society must be sufficiently advanced to find means of recreation, such as are | neither too refined nor too boisterous and athletic. To expect all sorts |

of people to take to reading the moment they have shut up shop is to |

Morning Herald.” . form a very delusive idea of the prevailing taste,’ declared the Sydney

Supporters of shorter working hours expected that the greater efficiency and punctuality of the well-rested labourer would more

than make up for his reduced hours of labour. By questioning the ! equation between hours of labour and productivity, the advocates of

the eight-hour day had undermined one of the pillars of orthodox

political economy. Their arguments gained greater plausibility as : industrialisation began to revolutionise the labour process. ‘In conse-

quence of the great increase of machinery during the past century, which was everywhere doing away with manual labour, there was no other way by which the workingman could possibly get the benefit of that machinery, except by shortening the hours of labour,’ declared

one sympathetic employer in 1874. Shorter hours, however, did not | necessarily mean more uniform times of starting and stopping work. | The same employer explained that in his own establishment, workmen might arrive at six, seven or eight o’clock in the morning. He

the eight hours.*! | did not mind when they arrived or departed so long as they worked : Ideas of measured time were at the very core of Australian work-

ing-class consciousness. In few contemporary societies did the ideal | of the eight-hour day come so close to practical realisation or achieve | quite the same symbolic significance. The holy trinity of organised labour, ‘Eight Hours Labor, Eight Hours Recreation, Eight Hours Rest’, became the focus of a popular annual festival, and the subject | of a rich tradition of iconography expressed in trade union banners, | domestic shrines and public monuments. This was not just because Australian workingmen were better able to realise the Eight Hours ideal, or because they placed a higher value on increased leisure than |

92

THE PURSUIT OF PUNCTUALITY

on increased wages—though both were probably true—but because they had become so thoroughly imbued with a sense of clock time as a primary measure of value.

Labour historians have often told the triumphant story of the winning of the eight-hour day, but they have seldom reflected on the social experience which supported that ideal. Many, perhaps most, colonial Australians continued to work in occupations subject to seasonal and intermittent demand in which the uniform working

day was the exception rather than the rule.” The eight-hour day was both a maximum and implicitly a more stable minimum day’s work.” By rationing work in times of high demand for labour, its effect was to spread the available work between more workers and

over a longer period of the year. In this respect, it reinforced the preference of Australian workingmen for secure and relatively equal conditions of employment and remuneration, an attitude which contrasts with the more acquisitive tendencies of American

workingmen, who often sought high wages at the expense of leisure. The Australian immigrant’s long, expensive journey from Britain, and his remote chances of return, may have influenced him

to place a higher value on sure access to employment than his American counterpart, who frequently chose high wages rather than shorter hours. By standardising the hours of work, the eight-hour day guaranteed

the workman’s leisure time, but it also placed a greater onus of punctuality upon him. One carpenter boasted that he had formerly often lost a quarter of an hour a day through lateness, but that since

the adoption of the eight-hour day he had never lost a minute.* Thomas Guest, proprietor of Melbourne’s first steam biscuit factory, was a stickler for punctuality, not only among his workers but also for himself. ‘I believe in a master setting the example of punctuality and prompt attention to anything he undertakes to do and seeing that others do the same,’ he wrote in an admonitory letter to his son.* He sought to instil punctuality in his youthful workforce by fining or dismissing latecomers. When it suited him, however, punctuality was a virtue he could easily discard. ‘We will not have any of this eight hours punctual business—these are not the times for it,’ he declared in the midst of the 1890s depression, when production and employment slumped and workers were grateful for work on any terms.”

That Guest repudiated the idea so vigorously, however, is some measure of the ground it had already made as a standard among his employees. 93

THE UNFORGIVING MINUTE

Late colonial Australians were no strangers to the idea of clock-time. Yet the evidence is strong that in the last quarter of the century there was a marked increase in the application of clock-time to the conduct of everyday life both at work and at home. Many factories and offices introduced rules and regulations for clocking on and off work. Clerks at Swallow and Ariell’s Melbourne biscuit factory, for example, were notified of the rule that: ‘Every officer upon arrival is to register his name in the time book, together with the exact hour indicated by the office clock.’” In 1904 a South Australian manufacturer looked back on the changing organisation of the boot and shoe industry. Only a

decade earlier, men worked according to the ‘old traditional conditions of the English shoe manufactory’. ‘A man came in when he liked, went out for a smoke or a drink when he liked and knocked off when he liked.’ But now, he observed, ‘a man comes in and starts as the bell rings, he works his 48 hours [per week] and leaves’.

ae | eeae ee a . aSibel ara Isyeee ie Ne 3 ofa,aes iL i es et are ae we on i ; Napa ae a y ii The tempo of women’s work was also changing. Almost every

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