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Having managed the successful 2012 launch of UWA’s new curriculum structure, Winthrop Professor Ian Reid has now launched his second novel, which evokes an era of promise and hardship that began with momentous events in 1912.

When the luxury liner RMS Titanic sank on her maiden voyage to New York on the night of 15 April, 1912, well over half the people on board lost their lives, but the toll would have been greater had the vessel not been equipped with wireless telegraph.

The liner boasting ritzy restaurants, gymnasium and swimming pool had one of the most powerful communication systems in the world: the newly invented wireless telegraphy. With a range of up to 1,000 miles, it was operated by the Marconi Company. Wireless made it possible to send distress signals by Morse code from the ‘unsinkable’ liner after it struck an iceberg five days into its fateful voyage.

A month earlier and closer to home off the West Australian coast, there was a maritime disaster on a different scale. The coastal steamer Koombana was engulfed by a cyclone within hours of leaving Port Hedland. With no radio on board, no one knew of the tragedy at the time and none of the 140 people on board survived.

“1912 was the year in which the relatively new Australian Commonwealth Government built one of Australia’s first telecommunication stations at Wireless Hill in Applecross,” observes Ian Reid.

“The government was aware of the importance of this new invention and of its responsibilities not only for the safety of shipping but also for the defence of the young nation. It was only a couple of years out from World War I. Two main transmission stations, one in Perth, one in Sydney, were built and before long we could communicate instantly with the eastern states!”

The recent centenary of the opening of the Wireless Hill station — the first of a string of stations established up the WA coast to Darwin — was marked at the Wireless Hill Telecommunications Museum in Applecross, and during the 30 September celebrations Ian Reid’s latest novel was launched there.

That Untravelled World tells the story of a young engineer who arrives in Perth to work on the wireless project, full of enthusiasm about the miraculous possibilities opened up by radio and other innovations of the day. But then his world darkens as personal misfortunes match the troubling context of the Great War and Great Depression. The plot is full of surprises.

Professor Reid knows the Applecross area well, having lived there for more than 20 years. Being a writer as well as an academic/administrator, he became fascinated by the era in which wireless telegraphy was born.

“Today people using Wi-Fi probably seldom stop to think that for Australia it all began in 1912,” he muses. “I set my novel in the period between 1912 and the outbreak of World War II, because the development of wireless during those years is one of the ways in which my story engages with the theme of a brave new world of modernity, a world in which Australia as a nation seemed on the brink of a wonderful new era powered by innovative technology.

“Air travel had arrived and it also brought the promise of a new world in which people could connect across great distances – and of course that has been accelerating ever since,” he says.

Ian Reid was the Foundation Professor of Literature at Deakin University, where he pioneered the bringing together of creative writing and literary study. He has an impressive list of academic publications to his credit.

The New Zealander came to WA to take up an appointment as Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Curtin University. He went on to become inaugural Chief Executive Officer of Leadership Western Australia before joining UWA as Senior Academic Reviewer for the new course structures.

His first foray into fiction was The End of Longing (UWA Publishing) which is now also available as an ebook. He clearly relishes the whole process of researching and writing historical fiction, which he admits becomes mildly obsessive “in that you find yourself having mental conversations with characters when sitting at traffic lights”.

“It’s been rewarding bringing these first two novels to fruition alongside other things, but I’ll be glad to have more scope for further writing in future,” he says.

“My doctoral thesis was on fiction set in the Depression era in Australia and New Zealand, so in That Untravelled World I am revisiting the 1930s on the basis of my earlier research. The novel’s main character is a man a little older than my father, who lived through those difficult times and hardships,” he says.

Further information on UWA Publishing titles is available online .

Published in Uniview Vol. 31 No. 3 Spring 2012