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Larapinta Trail | All about The Singing Line

Larapinta Track

As you travel through the red dirt landscapes of Central Australia, you will occasionally see lone poles of weathered hardwood protruding from the ground. Sometimes, they might be topped with a white porcelain insulator or even a few corroded remnants of copper wire. Mostly, they are just simple poles, like withered, denuded trees, leafless, branchless, dead.

These solitary timber sentinels, vertical in this universally horizontal landscape, are remnants of one of Australia’s most significant technical achievements: the Overland Telegraph Line. As you hike the Larapinta Trail, skirting this Overland Telegraph Line, you can ponder this outstanding achievement of many years ago.

The Songlines Larapinta Trail Sections

Before Europeans came to Australia, Aboriginal people had communicated across the land for thousands of years with songs, stories, and legends. Their songlines radiated across the landscape, telling tales of how the world came into being, how to navigate through it, where to find food and water, and how to behave when encountering people from other distant tribes.

These songs were carried by foot, slowly and inexorably across the country. They were living, breathing communication tools, constantly being amended and added to by the people who sang the songs and told the stories. And it had been that way for millennia.

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Larapinta Sections - The tyranny of distance

Australia is at the end of the world. Hidden in the middle of an almost endless ocean for the country’s early settlers, the distance between Australia and the old world of Britain presented an almost insurmountable problem when it came to communication.

As Australia grew from a small cluster of convict settlements, eking out a precarious existence on the edges of the continent, to a fully-fledged nation, it needed a way for information to reach it rapidly. News, dispatches and mail from Britain took months to make the long, arduous journey to and from Australia.

The new technology known as the telegraph enabled rapid communication between different parts of the world and rapidly expanded its network of copper wires and undersea cables across the globe. It was the answer to Australia’s communication problem.

Australia is at the end of the world. Hidden in the middle of an almost endless ocean for the country’s early settlers, the distance between Australia and the old world of Britain presented an almost insurmountable problem when it came to communication.

As Australia grew from a small cluster of convict settlements, eking out a precarious existence on the edges of the continent, to a fully-fledged nation, it needed a way for information to reach it rapidly. News, dispatches and mail from Britain took months to make the long, arduous journey to and from Australia.

The new technology known as the telegraph enabled rapid communication between different parts of the world and rapidly expanded its network of copper wires and undersea cables across the globe. It was the answer to Australia’s communication problem.

Mr Stuart’s Track

There was fierce competition between Australia’s colonial states about who would be the first to construct a telegraph line connecting the country with the rest of the world.

The Victorian Government had organised the Burke and Wills expedition to cross the continent to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860. But although Burke and Wills succeeded in crossing Australia, the tour ended in disaster, with both men dying alone in the bush.

Meanwhile, the South Australian government had organised an expedition led by the Scottish explorer John McDouall Stuart. After six attempts, Stuart crossed the continent from north to south. On the 24th of July 1862, he reached the northern coast of Australia at a place that he named Chambers Bay. 

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Around the same time, the Northern Territory was transferred into the control of South Australia. The aim of this was to secure land for an international telegraph connection running from Adelaide to Darwin.

Finally, in 1870, the South Australian government agreed to construct the 3,200 km of the telegraph line from Port Augusta in South Australia to Darwin. The stage was now set for the start of the most significant infrastructure project Australia had ever undertaken, the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line. It seemed like a simple job: a single strand of wire transcribing a straight line across the continent. It would turn out to be anything but simple.

Building the line

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Charles Todd, the South Australian Superintendent of Telegraphs, was appointed the head of the Overland Telegraph Line project. Todd devised a timetable for the completion of the massive project, and when the contracts were awarded, it was stipulated that it would take no more than two years to construct the line.

Todd divided the route into three 600-mile (970 kilometres) sections, with the northern and southern areas being handled by private contractors and the central team to be constructed by his own Department of Telegraphs.

The line would comprise 36,000 poles placed 80 metres apart, with repeater stations that would receive, amplify and relay the telegraph signals, to be built every 250 kilometres.

Construction of the northern section began in September 1870 and almost immediately encountered difficulties. The Wet Season began in November, with heavy rain which waterlogged the ground and made work impossible. The construction workers went on strike, complaining of rotten food and disease-spreading mosquitoes, and on May 3rd, 1871, the private contract was cancelled based on insufficient progress. The South Australian government now had to construct an additional 700 km of the northern section of the line, along with the central area that they had already begun.

Meanwhile, the British-Australian Telegraph Company was laying an undersea cable from Banyuwangi in Java to Darwin. This cable was finished on December 31st, 1871, in readiness for the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line.

After almost two years and seven months behind schedule, the two ends of the Overland Telegraph Line were joined at Frew’s Ponds, 640 kilometres south of Darwin, on Thursday, August 22nd, 1872. Charles Todd was honoured to send the inaugural message along the completed line. His message read:

We have this day, within two years, competed for a line of communication two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia, until a few years ago, a terra Incognita believed to be a desert.

A communications revolution

The Overland Telegraph Line proved to be an immediate success. In its first year of operation, 4,000 telegrams were sent. Explorers used the repeater stations as bases to explore the still largely uncharted “Inland” of Central Australia. Prospectors reported their golden discoveries via telegraph, setting off gold rushes across the continent; station owners received news of prices on the London Wool Exchange as their flocks radiated out into the Outback.

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The Singing Line

Nowadays, with our cell phones, internet, satellite communication, and instant access to as much information as we need, it’s hard to imagine what a great leap forward in technology the Overland Telegraph Line represented. Australia was now connected to the rest of the world. News, stock exchange reports, wool prices, military dispatches, and gossip could be directly conveyed from Britain to Australia in just a few hours rather than the months and months it had previously taken.Messages were sent along the line in the form of Morse Code. These tiny electrical pulses floated through the silent and empty bush, along the telegraph wires between the Repeater Stations, where technicians would translate the coded message and resend it to the next repeater station.These messages, which leap-frogged across the continent and the world, would be received just a few hours after they had been sent. Australia was now a part of the global village. The old songlines sang since the Dreamtime could now be heard everywhere on Earth.
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The Overland Telegraph Stations Today

The OTL ceased carrying international telegraph messages in 1935. By then, more advanced communications technology had superseded it. During World War Two, extra cross-arms and wires were added to the poles along the line to be used for telephone communications, but these were soon obsolete.

As radio, fibre optic cables, and satellite phones replaced the traditional analog systems, the wires were stripped from most of the line, and the repeater stations were abandoned.

As well as those odd, lonely poles in the deserts, the old repeater stations – such as the one at Peak Station on the Oodnadatta Track – can still be seen: forlorn relics, windowless and empty. However, the Overland Telegraph Station at Alice Springs has been fully restored to how it would have looked in its heyday when it formed part of the extended copper wire connection between Australia and the rest of the world.

So before you set off on your hike on the Larapinta Trail, accompanied by your cellphone and your GPS data, pause at the station and reflect on how far the world of telecommunications has come from the days of the Aboriginal songlines and the messages singing in the wires of the Overland Telegraph Line.

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Larapinta Trail tours - Is it worth?

The Larapinta Trail is an iconic and challenging bushwalking trail stretching 223km through the Red Centre of Australia. Spanning from Alice Springs to Mount Sonder in the West MacDonnell Ranges, it offers a rugged wilderness landscape and an opportunity for outdoor adventure seekers to experience some of the most spectacular scenery in Australia.

For those seeking a full Larapinta Trail experience but unable to complete the entire trek, Larapinta Trail tours are available that offer professional guided hikes along sections of the trail. Tour companies like Walking Country provide experienced guides who take visitors on half or full day Larapinta walking tours, offering insights into the local traditional Aboriginal culture, flora and fauna as well as providing logistical support with transport.

Secure your spot on one of our tours with only a $500 deposit. Email admin@walkingcountry.com.au

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