“We have this day, within two years, completed a line of communications two thousand miles long through the very centre of Australia …”
– First telegraph sent along the Overland Telegraph Line on 22/8/1872 by South Australia’s Superintendent of Telegraphs Charles Todd.
Australia’s most ambitious engineering feat of the 19th Century that revolutionised communication between Australia and the rest of the world, is today being celebrated at a remote site in the Northern Territory.
Around 130 people including dignitaries, historians, descendants of workers, and community members have gathered at Frew Ponds to honour the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line that crossed the continent from Adelaide to Darwin.
Completed on this day 150 years ago, the ‘whispering line’ – which connected to a subsea cable from Port Darwin to Java and beyond to England – launched a telegraphic network that enabled Australia to communicate with the world within hours rather than months.
More than 3000 kilometres long, the Overland Telegraph Line was made up of 36,000 telegraph poles, insulators, pins and many tonnes of wire. Eleven repeater stations were built along the route to boost the signal. The project, which cost £239,558, was managed by South Australia’s Superintendent of Telegraphs Charles Todd.
The official commemoration of the anniversary is at the Frew Ponds Overland Telegraph Line Memorial Reserve, 330 kilometres north of Tennant Creek, where the north and south wires were joined to link Port Darwin and Adelaide. The area, which features the original joining pole and dozens of Oppenheimer telegraph poles, is now a declared heritage site.
Quotes attributable to Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Chansey Paech:
“The joining of the two telegraph lines at Frew Ponds 150 years ago was a historically momentous occasion that shaped the economic and social prosperity of the Northern Territory and reformed Australia by breaking its isolation from the rest of the world.
“Back in the day, the completion of Overland Telegraph Line was as exciting and pertinent to the worldwide communication landscape as the more recent arrival of the internet. The vibe would have been amazing!
“The many tales of tenacity and toil; tears, triumph and tragedy that ran along the wire continue to bear witness to the strength and commitment of those who worked so hard, in adverse and extreme conditions to connect our country to the rest of the world.”
