[SulphurCrested]

We certainly had email before 1989. I managed systems at another university and had a working .edu.au email address there, email servers and a usenet feed, and had left that job by late 1986. In fact one of my systems was a beta for 4.2 BSD and I remember the protocol change to TCP from whatever came before it. At the same time Australia’s TLD changed from .oz to .au. Wikipedia says 4.2BSD came out in August 1983, so the 4.1z beta we ran must have come before that.

The University of Melbourne (munnari.oz) had a leased line to DEC’s Western Research Labs (decwrl) over which all of Australia’s traffic flowed. My systems connected to the Computer Science department’s machine, which had a link to munnari. Netnews was an overnight affair, and email slow. It was possible to remotely log in to an MIT system.

[FireBeyond]

My formative memories were on YoYo, a Monash University student group-owned DEC Alpha which was so overloaded with users that it never saw a load average not in the triple digits...

... and had an EFnet server that could only run from 9pm to 5am or so because it'd otherwise cripple connectivity (even before DoS style stuff).

[Scoundreller]

Any truth to early Australian usenet access just being a 10mb tape drive being mailed around (either internally, or internationally?)

[SulphurCrested]

Ours was via the network, although I think we didn’t take the alt tree.

Unix distributions, on the other hand, arrived on 9-track tape via the “distribution tree”. You would get a copy, then make copies and send those on. Bug reports (at least in my experience) went back the same way. I found the TCP URGENT off-by-one bug in the BSD API, and tried to report it to my upstream; it came back “will not fix”, but it was unclear whether that was some gatekeeper between me and BSD.

[emmelaich]

What came before it was ACSnet I believe, but it wasn't that pervasive or long lived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHSnet