I worked at UTS from 1991 in the IT department, starting just as NCSCA Mosaic and HTML was killing off Gopher and Turbo Gopher. UTS was the backbone for AARnet and I had a couple of computers with IP numbers that were directly accessible from anywhere. At that time the only people with e-mail addresses were staff from IT and staff and students from the faculties of engineering and science, but some time in the mid to late 1990s Sydney University offered free e-mail to all 50,000 students and all others universities were forced to follow suit (it was a HUGE support load).

Those mid-1990s were spent browsing through the free software archives of (I may have the names wrong) InfoMac and the another at the Berkeley. And general text-based nonsense on Usenet, of course.

At one stage I had a Mac running FileMaker Server 4 hosting then-popular documents about Jaguar (the car) XJ6 and XJ-S maintenance that I'd converted into a database (each sentence was a record) so it was fully searchable. It was up for a couple of years before the university's internal network was moved off the backbone.

As for Telstra buying the internet: most likely they took over the running of the hardware to support the backbone and moved it off-site (ie, out of UTS premises). It was getting expensive. I remember when it happened, our bandwidth dropped overnight and overall quality dropped. IIRC a couple of years later the universities built their own network again.