At 96, Laurence Wallace is not as strong as the first day he walked into Sydney’s cavernous telegraph office as World War II raged, but his hands are just as fast.
He is one of the few remaining master telegraph operators in Australia skilled in the dying art of Morse code, still able to code faster than most people can type.
As if it were yesterday, he remembers the bustling operations room filled with rows of people sending messages around the world and spreading world news.
“You’ll have all these sounds at the same time,” he says.
“Telegrams were used more than telephones at the time…it was much cheaper than a long-distance telephone call.”
Bob Carew up a pole on the Overland Telegraph Line. (Provided: State Library of South Australia)
Mr. Wallace’s love for dot script code began the day he was plucked from a crowd of applicants and fast-tracked to the high-stakes job, saving himself from fighting in the war in the process. .
So today is a very important day for him.
It’s the 150th anniversary of one of Australia’s greatest logistical and engineering feats, which you’d be forgiven not to know about.
On 22 August 1872, the mighty Overland Telegraph Line was connected, spanning the width of the continent, enabling rapid communication between Australia and the rest of the world for the first time.
Breaking Australia’s extreme isolation
It was the Internet before the Internet and it changed the country forever, built on a race against time and the harsh elements of the outback to connect Australia to the world.
Before, communication with the outside world was almost impossible for the early settlers.
Ships carrying newspapers and letters to loved ones made a long journey across the sea.
Jared Archibald says the Overland Telegraph Line was one of the greatest logistical and engineering feats in Australian history. (ABC News: Che Chorley)
“What was going on in London, back home, you didn’t know for two months or more,” says Darwin historian Jared Archibald.
“[The Overland Telegraph Line meant] you can get it in hours. So something like the queen dies, or there’s a change of government or whatever… these things were happening in hours.”
Basically, it was revolutionary, starting with an explorer’s solo trek through some of Australia’s harshest territory in 1862, after dozens of attempts.
“Within 10 years, a white man’s decade [John McDouall Stuart] doing that, we had wire strung up over 30,000 poles,” Archibald said.
“This allowed Australia to connect to a submarine cable, which came from Java, which then connected to telegraph lines and underwater cables to London.”
The human drama of building the line
The road from Adelaide to Darwin was known to Aboriginal people who had traveled it as a trade route for thousands of years.
But when the South Australian government won the bid for the overseas link, a two-year mission began to build the telegraph line through uncharted desert in time for the connection submarine, as there were significant fines if it was late.
There were already telegraph lines linking Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but each state wanted the connection to London as it meant it would be the first to receive global news.
An Overland Telegraph camp in 1921. (Supplied: The Overland Telegraph Line)
“It was a huge logistical exercise to perform a massive engineering feat,” Archibald said.
It was rough and tough, he said.
There were no townships, no roads, no trucks, no electricity, but the Bushmen were tasked with stringing 3,200 kilometers of cable from Darwin to Adelaide and erecting 36,000 telegraph poles.
“They were at the mercy of anything nature would throw at them,” Archibald said.
Space for play or pause, M for mute, left and right arrows for search, up and down arrows for volume. Listening Duration: 54 minutes 4 seconds54m Celebrating Charles Todd and the Terrestrial Telegraph
“Living off what you can carry on your horse in the pack saddles, so yes, it would be a very tough diet [of] salt, beef, buffer, some canned goods.
“There were men who died for all kinds of reasons … there was gangrene, there was also border violence.”
One of the lesser known facts about the feat is that the submarine cable broke in 1872.
Also, Darwin had been linked to London for some time before the end points of the line were finally connected.
And the final connection of the line took place at Frew Ponds, near Dunmarra, 640 kilometers south of Darwin in the Northern Territory, where more than 100 people are gathering today for the anniversary.
“Our numbers have dwindled”
While the Overland Telegraph Line broke Australia’s extreme isolation and laid the foundations for the communications revolution we have today, our reliance on the message service faded after World War II due to the growing use of the telephone.
Wallace is passionate about Morse code, but the number of people he can message has dwindled. (ABC News: Che Chorley)
But Wallace says we shouldn’t forget too soon.
“Everyone has fast communication at their fingertips… but what if these modern communication systems, some calamity happened and they disappeared?” he said
Wallace said the majority of people in Australia still able to decipher Morse code age quickly and the skills are not passed down.
“Our numbers have dwindled. I have about four people skilled enough to send Morse code,” he said, adding that overseas the penny had dropped on the importance of preserving the communication code.
“In America, they are training about 1,000 telegraphers in the armed services every year. It would be great to see that in Australia.”