Ancient (European) history

Most of my tour of Australia was planned to take in the natural sites: the forests, plains, wetlands and mountains, as well as the continent’s fauna, but I was also interested in some of the human story – not only the aborigines, but also the lives of the early European settlers. The extraordinary isolation of the Red Centre – 1500 km from Darwin in the north, Adelaide in the south, and the Indian Ocean in the west, and 2500 km from Brisbane in the east – presented extra challenges, and I took time out to visit two of the first European sites in the area.

The first of these is the very raison d’être of Alice Springs – the telegraph station about 4 km to the north of the current town centre. During the middle part of the 19th century, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney Brisbane and Tasmania were progressively linked by a telegraph network. The Adelaide to Darwin overland telegraph line, together with an undersea cable that came ashore at Darwin, was the link which finally connected Australia to the rest of the world, and Sydney to London via India. The 3200 km distance from Adelaide to Darwin necessitated twelve repeater stations along the route, where a telegraphist listened to the incoming signal in morse code, and then transmitted it to the next station along the line by tapping it out again. The line was built in just two years and completed in 1872. Alice Springs was one of the repeater stations.

The station consists of half a dozen stone buildings laid out neatly:

The heart of the station was the telegraph office,

where the morse code messages were re-transmitted

after arriving down a single copper wire from Adelaide:

Besides the telegraph office and accommodation, the station needed everything for a self-sufficient community, including a smithy for the blacksmith-stockman and a camel yard for the baggage trains that supplied the station. (You can just make out the telegraph line to Darwin.)

Alice Springs are not a spring at all, but a nearby waterhole in the otherwise usually dry bed of the Todd River. Alice was the wife of the former postmaster of South Australia, Charles Todd.

The other early European site that I visited was at Hermannsburg, 130 kilometers west of Alice Springs and close to the start of the road to Palm Valley and of the road known as the Mereenie loop. I discovered it more or less by accident when I was looking for the supermarket – which I never did find. The site was founded as an aboriginal mission by the Lutheran church in 1877, and consists of a precinct of 18 surviving buldings. The mission is an important heritage site in the chequered history of interaction between the aboriginal and European populations: unlike most other missions at that time, the early missionaries recorded, and taught in, the local aboriginal language, and the mission was a refuge for aboriginal people during the violent frontier conflict that was a feature of early pastoral settlement in central Australia.

The church is the centre piece of the spacious settlement, and was completed in 1880:

Like the telegraph station, the mission impressed me with how well the European settlers lived in such isolated circumstances. The buildings were all constructed with deep verandahs to protect the interior from the searing heat …

… and the furniture, domestic appliances and decorations were what one would expect in a European household from the same era: neat, functional, but not uncomfortable. It struck me that, in an era before mains water, electricity and gas, living in such isolation would have been no more instrinsically difficult than living in Europe, but that transporting goods and appliances from outside was the real challenge. I wondered what stories the piano would have had to tell …