Author Description

In asking how Australia learned to tell the time, Graeme Davison uncovers a surprising story. From ship's chronometers to digital clocks, from time-balls to time pips, from dreamtime to flexitime, clocks and time-keeping have been the quiet revolutionaries of Australian history. As the convict era drew to an end, the colonial governors looked to clocks as the mechanical policemen of an emerging free society. Fifty years later, as railways and telegraphs began to spread across the land, and pocket watches appeared on the waistcoats of working men, colonial society began to keep stricter hours of work and play, and to teach its children the virtue of punctuality. In the early 20th century, punch clocks and time-switches laid the basis for new patterns of work in the factory and the home. Now, in the 1990s, the "faceless clocks" in computers and automated control systems have created a "postmodern" time regime that is both more flexible, and more demanding, than its predecessors. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical insights and primary sources, "The Unforgiving Minute" offers an original interpretation of Australian history.