I have spent most of my career working in digital, it is therefore with great excitement and understandable confusion that I announce that you can read me in a print-only magazine . . .

Galah is a love letter to regional Australia, and the clever, quirky, creative and resilient people who live there.

Over three ad-free issues each year, Galah is a lark of a read breaking all the modern rules of publishing.

First a fan, then an occasional consultant through my role at Google, Annabelle got so sick of me talking about dingoes, wombats and high-speed satellite Internet, that she asked me to write for her.

In this edition, I write about how an eccentric American billionaire is delivering the Internet to the outback on the rockets of his childhood dreams.

I've included an excerpt below. For more, order Galah online. And it will be delivered delightfully to your mailbox.

Beyond the Lines - Neil Varcoe

American billionaire Elon Musk wants to bring fast internet to the world, including remote and regional Australia, launching a constellation of satellites into space. Beta trials are underway, and the results look promising.

It was about forty degrees in the shade and the man on my roof was having a meltdown. His sweat painted a line across the corrugated roof as he walked back and forth trying to find a satellite signal. He’d arrived earlier from Bathurst, an hour and a half drive with a tail wind. It was 2016 and this was our second attempt at installing the internet at Warramba, our remote farmhouse in the Capertee Valley near Lithgow. It wasn’t going well. I offered him a Zooper Dooper to lift his mood and retreated to the shed. The NBN is not a spectator sport, although, in a way, it has become a spectacle. Now, though, an eccentric American entrepreneur is offering hope to the people who have been left behind, using his rockets to deliver the internet to the outback.

Australia has broadband internet speeds ahead of Serbia and Belarus but behind Estonia, Bulgaria and Trinidad and Tobago. This places us 57th in the world, and about 40 per cent slower than the average.*

On 23rd December 2020, the Minister for Communications, Paul Fletcher, issued a press release declaring that the NBN rollout was complete. It was a whimpering end to 11 hellish years of a project that had been announced as the ‘single largest infrastructure decision in Australia’s history’ by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

The press release was largely checkbox stuff: a step that had to be completed by 31st December in order to pave the way for privatisation. But while the Minister’s email hit journalists’ inboxes at varying speeds on a mongrel mix of technology, Lisa Powell was still looking for a signal.

*Based on speedtest.net data in April 2021.

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