Posts published in “About”

AustralianPolitics.com is 18 years old. I can’t place the birthday precisely, except that it was somewhere during the mid-year school holidays in 1995. July 1 seems a suitably mid-point date to mark the occasion.

My first ever web page was a set of teaching notes on the Watergate scandal. They formed the basis of what is now a separate website, Watergate.info.

Within weeks of the page appearing, I began receiving emails from American students, teachers, librarians and others seeking information and asking questions. Many just wanted to debate Watergate. They were nicer times online than now.

Sometime during those holidays, I also posted Australian politics material. I think another set of teaching notes on the Whitlam Dismissal might have been the first Australian content. Thereafter the site began to take shape around the structure of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) Politics course.

The website was hosted on my NetSpace internet account. Its very clunky URL was http://netspace.net.au/~malcolm.

One of my first memories of experiencing the power of the internet was the March 1996 federal election. Online newspapers were just starting around then and not much content appeared online. I started posting a daily election update, a very simple account of what was being reported in the news, supplemented by occasional audio items and election literature. Traffic began appearing almost immediately.

One night during the campaign, a work commitment kept me from posting an update. An Australian living in Sweden emailed me to say he was relying on me for news about the election. Others also contacted me and I began to realise there was an audience out there. It was small but growing. It continues to grow to this day. The internet revolution is still in its early stages.