Day 25 - The Alice Springs Overland Telegraph Station

Day 24 - Friday - 12/6/2026

This morning we went to the town centre where we walked to the cinema and watched the movie The Sheep Detectives. It was a pretty good movie about some talking sheep trying to solve a murder mystery with some funny jokes and a well set out plot. Then we went back to the caravan park and did schoolwork went for a swim and then watched another movie at the caravan park called Kangaroo while we ate dinner. The movie was about a guy who rescues kangaroos because of her friend Charlie.

Day 25 - Saturday - 13/6/2026

Today we woke up at 6AM to go to the Alice Springs Parkrun. Everyone ran the full 5km except for grandma and grandpa for obvious reasons but at the end we were all pretty tired, I came 61st out of the 99 people that raced.

After Parkrun

Then we had breakfast at Maccas and then came back to where we did Parkrun to check out the overland telegraph station. Charles Todd designed and oversaw the overland telegraph line and named Alice Springs after his wife Alice despite the fact that she never visited the town named after her. The main reason Alice Springs was created was to be a station for the overland telegraph line which in 1870 was the main way Australia communicated with England using morse code. Morse code was a way of communicating great distance using a machine with a button and clicking it. The machine used dots and dashes representing different letter and numbers, a dot would be held for 1 beat, a dash for 3, after every letter you wait 1 beat and after every word you wait 3 beats. Some letters I remember are: S dot dot dot, O dash dash dash and E dot. 

Using the morse code telegraph

The overland telegraph had many stations across Australia which connected to the world telegraph through this line, when a message was sent to England it would go through each station where someone would receive the message and then send it to the next station until it reaches England. The reason there were so many stations or repeaters was because there would not be enough power to send the message to England. The overland telegraph was essentially a 200-year-old messaging app, and it increased the communication speeds from 3 to 6 months into around a day. 

Items at the telegraph station

Then we went home did schoolwork and had a swim.

Comments

  1. AnonymousJune 15, 2026 at 6:09 PM

    Very good account of the telegraph operation. Kevin

    ReplyDelete

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