The telegraph line and another gorgeous gorge
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| The original Alice Spring NT |
First up today we visited the Alice Telegraph station which is situated on a hill just out of town. This original settlement was called Stuart and the Alice Springs comes from a waterhole in the Todd river which the Europeans thought was a spring. It is currently dry. There is lots of water in the Todd River and in most of the inland rivers, but it is all underground. Dig a few centimetres into the sand and the water will well up.
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| Stuart Telegraph Station NT |
The telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin was completed in 1872 which allowed Australia to be connected to the rest of the world via an undersea link to Indonesia. Before that any news was carried by letter on a ship. The Adelaide to Darwin section of the project took 2 years to complete which is an amazing feat of engineering given the unknown territory they were travelling through. There were 12 repeater stations along the line as the morse signal could only travel about 250km before becoming too faint. The operators must have been very accurate otherwise the end message might have ended up quite different to the start if not accurately repeated. The telegraph station closed in 1932 when it was relocated to the new town of Alice Springs.
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| Trephina Gorge NT |
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| Trephina Gorge NT |
Later we visited another lovely gorge, Trephina, this time in the MacDonnell ranges east of Alice Springs. This is the first river we have seen with the water actually flowing, albeit just a trickle.
The rocks here range from mauve to oxide red and looked beautiful in the afternoon sun.
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