Twenty to the Mile: The Overland Telegraph Line by Derek Pugh

Book Description

Secondhand. Near fine condition.

Australia's greatest engineering problem - the tyranny of distance - had a solution: the electric telegraph and its champion was the sheep-farming colony of South Australia.

In two years, Charles Heavitree Todd, leading hundreds of men, constructed a telegraph line across the centre of the continent from Port Augusta to Darwin. At nearly 3,000 kilometres long and using 36,000 poles at '20 to the mile', it was a mammoth undertaking, but in October 1872, Adelaide was finally linked to London.

The Overland Telegraph Line crossed Aboriginal lands first seen by John McDouall Stuart just ten years before. Messages which previously took weeks to cross the country now took hours. Passing through eleven new repeater stations and the remotest parts of Australia, the line joined the vast global telegraph network, and a new era was ushered in.

Each station held a staff of six. They became centres of white settlement and the cattle or sheep industry, and, in many places, the Aborigines were displaced.

The unique stories of how men and women lived and/or died on the line range from heroic through desperate to tragic, but they remain an indelible part of Australia's history. (back cover)