The epic race to connect Australia to the rest of the world
This is the story of Australia’s Overland Telegraph and the man who built them, an English grocer’s son named Charles Todd.
On 11 May 1844 American Samuel Morse sent a telegraph message from the Supreme Court in Washington to a colleague in Baltimore, 65 kilometres away. The message, a one-line quotation from the Bible, was transmitted in a sequence of dots and dashes created by switching the voltage along the wire on and off.
Morse had devised the code himself, along with other technical innovations that made his system far superior to a rival British invention. Telegraph wires soon crisscrossed the globe, snaking under oceans and along newly built railway lines, carrying information and news to every inhabited continent but one.
The first Australian telegraph message – a list of ship arrivals – was transmitted from Williamstown on Port Phillip Bay to Melbourne in March 1854, but it would be another 18 years before the Australian colonies could communicate directly with London via an Overland Telegraph connecting Australia’s north and south coasts. David Dufty’s lively and well-researched book, Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession, tells the story of those singing wires and poles and the man who built them, an English grocer’s son named Charles Todd.
As with so many big Australian stories, this one is steeped in internecine rivalry. Originally hired by South Australia to build a telegraph line between its capital city and its port, Todd soon began lobbying for something much bigger: an Overland Telegraph from Port Darwin to Adelaide that would make Adelaide the first Australian city to receive international news and allow South Australia to win the lion’s share of telegraph revenue.
Queensland, however, was determined the route should follow the east coast, bypassing Adelaide altogether. When the South Australian governor invited New South Wales and Victoria to co-sponsor an expedition tasked with finding a viable route through the interior, both refused. South Australia decided to go it alone and Todd was given 18 months to build the Overland Telegraph, which would connect Australia to the outside world via a submarine cable to Java.
Dufty describes Todd’s decision to accept the job as “insanity”. He knew all about how to build a telegraph line but virtually nothing about the Australian interior. All he had to guide him from one end of the continent to the other was the maps drawn up eight years earlier by explorer John McDouall Stuart, and these, Dufty points out, were hopelessly inadequate, because Stuart had travelled light, on horseback, and the track he took could not be taken by wagons and bullock teams.
Sceptics argued that much of the suggested route traversed desert and treeless plain: where would Todd find wood for the poles? He insisted he could transport logs long distances on bullock drays or import steel poles if he had to. As well as managing the entire project and running the colony’s telegraph and postal systems, Todd was made personally responsible for building the central section – the driest and harshest section of the line. What could possibly go wrong?
Disaster never seems far away as Todd’s men inch northwards. The ghosts of dead explorers haunt the narrative. A charlatan claims to have found maps and papers belonging to Ludwig Leichhardt. A party under John Ross, a station manager hired to find a way through the McDonnell Ranges, gets lost and misses a wooden sign nailed to a tree – “Mr Ross dig half a mile northwest”. They fail to find the buried tucker but, unlike the unlucky Burke and Wills, they survive. “Ross had come highly recommended as the best available explorer in the colony,” Dufty tells us, “but he was prone to … losing his way.”
Short, racy chapters keep the story bouncing along, and excellent maps illustrate the telegraph’s progress across the continent. Dufty has done his time in the archives and his book exhumes some colourful characters from Australia’s colonial past, among them the Government Resident in Port Darwin, William Bloomfield Douglas, a feckless British naval officer who revelled in his role as the “Rajah of Port Darwin”. Erratic, depressed and often drunk, Douglas devoted his energies to the construction of an official residence while neglecting to build a wharf: the horses and bullocks transported by ship from Adelaide to supply the telegraph teams had to swim ashore. Todd completed the line, several months late but without any major cost overruns, but that did not stop the carpers, who predicted that the poles would fall over and white ants would eat the wooden insulators.
A century later, it was still working. A technology that was once a symbol of Australia’s integration into the modern world “faded away so gradually”, Dufty writes elegiacally, “that when it ended, sometime in the 1980s …. nobody noticed, because nobody used it anymore”.
Andy McCarthy’s Here Comes the Sun tells the story of another magnificent obsession – the author’s efforts to build a renewable energy company in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley. Belatedly diagnosed with ADHD, McCarthy dropped out of high school – a “place of last resort” 500 metres from the local abattoir – before he was 16. After working 40 jobs between the ages of 12 and 24, he found his calling in a company selling solar panels – a lightbulb moment that prompted him to start his own business in what could be described as enemy territory. “It’s fair to say,” McCarthy writes, “that if you wanted to start a renewable energy business in 2010, the Latrobe Valley would be the last place you would pick. This is a region where coal was king, and the four coal-fired power stations dominated the economy, the landscape, and the hearts and minds of locals.”
Given the cover endorsement by Lonely Planet founder Tony Wheeler (“An incredible story; a must-read for any aspiring leader”), it’s not exactly a spoiler to say McCarthy came up trumps, although he had to overcome some serious obstacles along the way. You won’t be reading this book for its prose (“We became one of their largest installers of Powerwall home batteries in Australia and installed dozens of EV charging stations”) but it’s an uplifting tale of success against the odds.
Tom Gilling’s last book was The Diggers of Kapyong.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout