Pathways

Back row, left to right: Kate Sheldon, Annie Murray, Edith Aulsebrook, Amy Abraham, Edith Hawker, Sarah Gallagher, Alice Hibbert. Front row, left to right: Mary Armstrong, Ada Warburton, Frances Wall, Mrs Dick (Supervisor), Eleanor Ferguson, Annette Bowler, Lil McDonnell

In 1896 John Hesketh (1868-1917) became Chief Electrical Engineer for the Queensland Post and Telegraph Department. He was the first British Post Office engineer to be recruited to an Australian Post Office. In Queensland he laid the way for several reforms including the adoption of underground metallic wires (by 1910 practically all city-lines were running underground), the provision of standard telephones and the setting of telephone rates. In 1901 he was nominated as the Queensland delegate for the Departmental Electrical Committee which reported on the communication system in the newly established federal government. Through an inspection of the Brisbane telephone system he concluded that Queensland’s telecommunications system was the best within Australia and therefore did not require major reforms. Five years later Hesketh became Chief Electrical Engineer of the Commonwealth Government’s Postmaster General’s Department and in this function he supported the idea of automatic switching and started to set up automatic exchanges for the Australian capital city networks. This was a bold decision. At this time only two large networks in the world had an automatic exchange - Los Angeles and San Francisco.