Before the telegraph they used to do things wirelessly: https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/_downloads/telegraph/tele...
(Not quite London to Australia though...)
In the late-1700s/early-1800s the Admiralty Telegraph was used to relay messages between London and Portsmouth (70 odd miles apart) using a semaphore type system with repeater stations every 10 miles or so.
The Netherlands was too far away from the courts in Spain for them to govern effectively. Travel time was measured in weeks. So, remote regions like that necessarily had a large degree of autonomy. That became the basis for power to centralize around Amsterdam as it was favorably located for for trading. There were a lot of grievances with religious issues (Catholicism vs. Protestantism), taxation, etc. But the Spanish failure to project power from a distance had everything to do with the centralized nature of their empire and long communication channels.
In the so called golden century (17th century), the Netherlands got filthy rich on global trade and expansion. Information and knowledge flowed to and from Amsterdam from all over the world.
The Dutch naval forces dominated the North Sea for quite some time and it's only later that the British emerged as the better/bigger empire. Navies and ships were the fastest way to move information around at the time. Until the British finally upgraded to cables and telegrams which enabled them to have colonies on all continents. They really nailed command and control across their empire for a while.
The Romans had their roads to move armies and information. Shipping and navigation technology leveled that up from the 1400s or so. These days, low latency communication is a commodity of course.
https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_histo...
Sadly the semaphore pole itself is gone. The building is still there and was used until 1969.