Day 35 Alice Springs

23 June

All the car travelling, sight seeing and rock scrambling we did yesterday, left us feeling somewhat the worse for wear this morning.  So we decided not to travel down to Hermannsburg mission.  Instead, we had a long sleep in and sat around 'til lunchtime and then visited the old Telegraph Station, which was the beginning of Alice Springs and which is the last remaining station of a chain of stations that ran from Darwin to Adelaide.

Even though the telegraph and morse code had existed since the 1830's and most of the world, including the Australian colonies, had been connected by telegraph since the 1850's, a further twenty years would pass before Australia was connected to the rest of the world.  Try to imagine what it must have been like living in a country and not knowing, until several months after the event, what was happening in Europe, whether your relatives in "the old country" were alive or dead.  Imagine trying to raise capital for investing in the enormous opportunities that were now occurring in this new land and having to wait the best part of a year before your loan was secured.  You, quite literally, had to wait for your ship to come in.  The international telegraph changed all that.


The shortest distance for an international telegraph line to the main population centres was to bring the line ashore at Darwin, and then run it overland across the centre of Australia, south to Adelaide where it would join the domestic network.  The only difficulty was that most of this country was still unexplored and unknown to european settlers.  That did not stop the effort and by 1872 Australia was talking to the rest of the world.  At a cost of a pound a word, mind you, but talking.  The difference this made to the development of the Australian nation is impossible to overestimate.

The line was 3000 kms long.  Passing an electric current over this distance was impossible. So repeater stations had to be constructed and manned every 120 kms.  Because of the nature of the landscape, the climate and the total lack of roads or railways.  The stations and the people who kept them running, were totally cut off from physical contact with other people for months at a time.

The station at about the middle of the OT line was Alice Springs.  Initially, it was just a couple of rough buildings in the middle of nowhere.  But as the cattle industry developed and gold and other minerals were discovered in this part of the Northern Territory a small village grew up around it.  Initially, the village was named Stuart.  However, as everyone called it by the same name as the telegraph station,  Alice Springs, the authorities bowed to the inevitable and changed it to Alice Springs.

The station buildings that we see today were built in 1898, when everything still had to be brought in by camel train.  I was struck by how well-built and solid these buildings are when all the materials, with the possible exception of the building stone, had to be brought in over huge distances.  The station operated until 1932 by which time radio and telephone communication had developed to the point that it was no longer required. After that, it was used as a school for Aboriginal children, many of whom, sadly, had been forcibly removed from their parents.  The school finally closed in 1960 and the buildings began falling into disrepair.

Now, however, they have been carefully and faithfully restored.  Hope you enjoy the photos.