Australasia

Alice Springs

It's a long drive from Uluru to the Alice, 450 kilometres with just one little township on the way.

After an hour or so one comes across the Mount Conner Lookout and toilet stop. We were unprepared for the sight of this mountain that is a classic example of an inselberg, a small mountain left isolated on an otherwise eroded plain. In this case it is a remnant of a once higher sedimentary layer standing 300 metres above the surrounding plain.

 
Mount Conner

Wendy and I shared the drive after I stopped on the way for lunch at the Erldunda Roadhouse, where we got to see some captive emus.

The road is excellent and the car could be set to cruise, generally at 110 kph but up to 130 for part of the way. Oncoming traffic was light so the occasional slower caravan or campervan didn't delay us very much.

Erldunda Roadhouse emu and a burger for lunch (beef not emu)
Then on the road again - the Stuart Highway- and now I could use my camera

As we neared our destination the MacDonnell Ranges could be seen on the western horizon.

 
MacDonnell Ranges

Reaching Alice Springs, we didn't know what to expect as several friends had given the town a bad rap. So, our impressions were favourable. The town looked prosperous and business-like and the much-vaunted social problems didn't seem very evident. The trusty TomTom delivered us to our hotel.

As we were able to cook meals we visited the Woolworths Supermarket, downtown, and found it to be very similar to those back in Sydney - or anywhere in Australia.

Alice is a university town, a major medical centre and the second largest city in the Northern Territory. The population is around 25,500, making it the 55th Australian city in size, by population. Yet that's two thousand smaller than Mosman Municipality, one of Sydney's smaller local government areas.

The first task was to go shopping: some bubbly and a good red at the top of the list.

The main sign that there were problems with drunkenness were restrictions on the sale of alcohol. There is a police presence outside every retailer of alcohol, checking identities and the intended place of consumption. Yet this was not necessarily based on ethnicity as there were, obviously indigenous, customers who had apparently satisfied the entry criteria.

There are a number of tourist attractions in town and first up was the excellent Natural History Museum, at which one can learn about the geology, plants and fauna of the region as they evolved to those we see today. There was also a very informative historical photographic exhibition detailing early European settlement and their interactions with the indigenous peoples. For copyright reasons no photographs were allowed.

Another point of interest is the Alice Springs Botanic Gardens, developed by a Miss Pink - unlike any botanic gardens I've ever been to elsewhere.

Alice Springs Botanic Gardens - native shrubs; flowers; and grasses - not exactly lush

The Old Alice Springs Gaol - now also houses the Women's Museum of Australia. Here there is an exhibition celebrating Australian women pioneers in many fields particularly in aviation, very important to Central Australia.

Old Alice Springs Gaol (with prisoner cell art) - and the Women's Museum of Australia.

The Royal Flying Doctor service also has a museum featuring mainly audio-video presentations but there are some early pedal-radios and virtual reality headsets that share the experience of flying in the co-pilot's seat and caring for a patient suffering heart failure. All very interesting.

Yet the principal tourist attraction on the entire trip, from my point of view, is the Alice Springs Telegraph Station Historical Reserve.

 
Alice Springs Telegraph Station - The first of a number of substantial colonial buildings
due to remoteness constructed of local materials - originally with thatched roofs

Although multi-wire telegraphy had been used along railway lines in England since the 1830's it was not until the single wire system employing 'Morse Code', invented by Samuel Morse, was developed in the 1840's that long distances could be covered economically. The wire provided one conductor while the Earth provided the return path to complete the circuit.

Such was the utility of the new technology that by 1855 telegraph lines already reached Java in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) via Malaya and India and an undersea cable was proposed as far as Darwin.

In Australia, Melbourne and Adelaide were connected in 1858 and in the following year Melbourne was connected to Sydney.

The only remaining problem was how to traverse the unexplored continent. Victoria and South Australia offered prizes for the first explorers to find a route. In 1861 the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition ended in tragedy. They got as far as the Gulf of Carpentaria but on the way home the final stragglers became ill and died, possibly due to consuming improperly prepared 'bush tucker'.

The South Australian's candidate had acquired more skills and knowledge and managed a lot better. On his sixth attempt, in 1862, John McDouall Stuart at last found an overland route to Darwin; and in 1865 the South Australian Parliament approved construction of the telegraph line. Today's Stuart Highway closely follows his path.

Building the telegraph line was a huge undertaking requiring a pole every 80 metres for 3,200 km (2,000 miles) across this previously unexplored, by non-indigenous people, inhospitable territory.

Young William Whitfield Mills, then aged 27, was employed to survey part of the route and when his party found a gap in the McDonnell Ranges, through which the telegraph line could be run, they came upon the Todd River. It had recently rained so there was water at this normally dry spot. So, he named the river after his boss, the South Australian Superintendent of Telegraphs, Charles Todd, and the 'springs' after his boss's wife: Alice. Thus, one of the principal repeater stations was built here and took the name 'Alice Springs'.

 
Alice Spring Marker
Mills wrote in his diary that upon discovering the dry riverbed they followed it down to find:
'numerous waterholes and springs, the principal of which is the Alice Spring which I had the honour of naming after Mrs Todd'.

With unrelenting desert in the south and centre and tropical swamps in the north, for a time, it seemed that the builders had bitten off more than they could chew. Yet the line opened just seven months behind schedule on Thursday, 22 August 1872. Todd sent the first message:

 
Historic Engineering Marker

Initially the repeater stations operated like the old semaphore repeaters, like the one that used to be at Pennant Hills, between Sydney Town and Parramatta. The message was received by an operator, recorded manually, and then resent on its way. Obviously, this was both time consuming and prone to accumulating errors at each of the eleven Australian stages, and many more stages to London.

This potential for corruption is well known to those who've played the party game: 'Chinese Whispers'. For example, if great care is not taken not to add or delete the word 'NOT' (dash dot; dash dash dash; dot), the message conveys the opposite of that intended.

Information theory says that errors, known as noise, can never be entirely eliminated. The telegraph was inherently noisy. When wires are suspended on poles, natural phenomena, such as lightning, can easily obscure parts of the message or add two dots where a dash should be, perhaps turning 'NOT' into 'SOT', thus requiring clarification. The experience gained, as a result of early telegraphy, was invaluable in our progress towards modern communications.

Today, digital communications employ a check-bit on every byte and a check-sum on every data packet transmitted over a network, so that any packet failing to match its sum, due to missing, reversed, or extra bits, is disregarded and automatically re-sent until verified. This is one of the principal reasons for transitioning networks; and many other systems, such as graphics; from analogue to digital in the late 20th century.

In the beginning a message to London took four days; directly and indirectly requiring many person-hours of transcribing and resending; and it cost a small fortune. Yet the psychological impact on Australia's sense of isolation was profound. Four days was a huge advance on a letter that might arrive in two months; with the reply requiring another two months.

There was considerable and expensive on-going maintenance repairing the wires some 30,000 iron poles and many more thousands of timber poles. The more remote stations like Alice Springs and Tennant Creek required a permanent staff to maintain the batteries and relay messages.

Staffing and resupply overheads were substantial
Everything had to be brought in by camel trains managed by 'Afghans'
Actually, mainly from what is now Pakistan - then northern India
The train when it finally arrived was called 'The Ghan' in tribute and many ancestors remain in the Alice today

The batteries consumed significant tonnages of chemicals and maintaining them took up a lot of the men's time.

Maintenance overheads

In the interests of robustness and cost the first wire used was of galvanised iron imported from England. But the electrical conductivity of this metal is relatively poor requiring repeater stations every 250 km with an EMF of 220 volts - about as high as one can go without killing the occasional operator. Lightening was another serious hazard to the operators and a lightening conductor was installed on every second pole.

The undersea cable to which it was connected was a single wire of brass sheathed galvanised copper, enabling much longer runs without a repeater. So, it was soon decided to upgrade the wire to copper enabling the removal of many intermediate repeater stations.

The technology improved steadily. Soon it was possible to punch a paper tape and then resend the received message without re-keying it. Soon improved undersea cables connected other parts of Australia.

The single wire system employing 'Morse Code'
and paper tape technology foreshadowing the 20th century Telex

So, in just a few years after the first European explorers: the route had been surveyed and mapped, with considerable accuracy; a two-thousand-mile-long telegraph line had been constructed, complete with supply lines to eleven repeater stations along its length; and the South Australian Government had begun to encourage pastoralists to take up vast properties to grow cattle - cattle stations. Opening the country was an even greater priority for some and the first pastoral leases in the Alice Springs region were granted even before the telegraph line was completed.

Soon the small town of Stuart, about three kilometres south of the telegraph station on the Todd River, was founded. The first growth spurt was when alluvial gold was discovered nearby in 1887, bringing in fossickers. But it wasn't until 1929, when the train line from Adelaide was built, following the route of the telegraph line, that Stuart's non-Aboriginal population began to grow.

Yet the telegraph station remained the principal communications hub and confusion with the Stuart rail terminus resulted in the town's name being changed to Alice Springs in 1933. There was another population surge during WW2 when the rail terminus became an important military staging point, in support of Darwin that had come under attack from the Japanese.

In 2004 Alice Springs was connected to Darwin by rail, completing the link from Adelaide. Contrary to expectation, since that time the population of Alice Springs has declined.

Running through town is the almost permanently dry Todd River the deep sands of which create a challenge for the many legged 'boats' of the annual Henley on Todd Regatta.

 
Site of the Henley on Todd Regatta

Due to Covid-19 'The Regatta' was cancelled this year for the second time only. The first time was when the river, uncooperatively, had water in it.

We felt the need to see some running water and drove out to Simpsons Gap in the West MacDonnell Ranges.

Simpsons Gap

After three days we considered that we'd had a good look around. No doubt there are other things to see and do but they will have to wait for another time.

The following morning, we set out for Kings Canyon 322 kilometres away.