Wireless Priest

Around 1910 a forward thinking Catholic priest, Archibald Shaw, was experimenting with spark-gap wireless about a decade before broadcast radio took-off. He founded an engineering factory in the Sydney suburb of Randwick. Shaw was a missionary priest and his intention was to use the wireless sets he manufactured to keep in touch with distant missionaries throughout New Guinea and the Pacific Islands. He hoped that profits from his factory might bring his order’s missionary accounts out of debt as well. Within a short time his business won a large tender to construct Australia’s first Coastal Wireless Service established by the government in the aftermath of the Titanic disaster of 1912.

In 1916 Shaw became unconscious in the company of a man and two prostitutes in his room at the Melbourne Coffee Palace. He had just finalised the sale of his factory, Australia’s first wireless manufacturing business, to the Royal Australian Navy. A large sum of cash he withdrew from the bank two days prior could not be accounted for.

He was about to return to Sydney and move to America with a woman to whom he is secretly engaged. Five days later he is dead.

An ensuing Royal Commission into the purchase of his business revealed government corruption and led to the sacking of a Minister of the Crown and the resignation of a Tasmanian senator. The mystery surrounding Shaw’s death is never resolved. A police report has disappeared and the missing money is never traced.

An astonishing tale, meticulously researched: this is the extraordinary story of Archibald Shaw – orphan, missionary priest, wireless engineer, businessman and keeper of secrets.

Author Biography

Matthew Ryan completed post-graduate studies in physics and theology and has a graduate certificate in documentary filmmaking. He is a Churchill Fellow and was the inaugural Science Teacher Fellow at the University of Sydney in the School of Physics. He is a licensed radio amateur and has conducted several contacts between students and astronauts aboard the International Space Station and built equipment powerful enough to bounce radio signals off the moon.