Andrew Betts

After the previous day’s long coach journey, it was a relief not to have to get up early. The problem with this, or course, is that all the good restaurants and cafes have stopped serving breakfast. Fortunately, after a brief wander down the Todd Mall, I found an excellent café that served breakfast all day.

Refuelled and raring to go, I set off to find my target for the day, the old telegraph station. In the days before telephones, email, and mobile phones, the fastest form of communication was a telegraph line. Unfortunately, there were no lines connecting the south coast of Australia with the north, and so important messages that needed to get to London had to go by boat, which took three months each way (imagine how frustrating it must have been to get back “paper was soggy, please re-send”). The establishment of a telegraph line would cut that time down to mere hours, so it is unsurprising that just two years after the successful mapping of a route between Adelaide and Port Darwin, the Overland Telegraph Line was built. This station in Alice was one of about 12 repeater stations along the length of the line.

The problem was, I had no concept of how far away it was. I’m sure I had read somewhere that it was “a short stroll”, but this must have been written by an Australian, because the distance is close to four kilometres. Hot, sweating, and with a greatly increased chance of developing skin cancer in later life, I emerged at the station and duly paid my A$6 admission. The station was well worth the walk - wonderfully preserved, and the tour guides wore period clothing, which was a nice touch.

Unwilling to make the trek back to the town while it was still hot, I wandered over to the water hole nearby, and noticed an artist sitting in the shade of a tree high up on a rocky ridge. Thinking this was a good opportunity to read my holiday books, I climbed and found that the view from the top was excellent, especially considering it wasn’t really that high. I read for a couple of hours, before returning to town along the same riverside walking track (‘riverside’ is an interestingly ambiguous term here since the Todd River rarely has any water in it - it was almost completely dry when I was there, and certainly wasn’t flowing). The track was now entirely in the shade, and this made the trip back seem considerably shorter.

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