‘The most perfect invention’
The arrival of the telegraph in Australia
Nothing could have proved so transforming to Australian society in the nineteenth century as the technology
of the telegraph. Alerted by Faraday’s experimentation on electromagnetism in London which had opened up
the electric telegraphy field, Samuel Morse in Baltimore, USA, was by 1844 tapping out his first telling
message, ‘What Hath God Wrought’, to Washington. Nine years later, early in 1853, spurred by the
Victorian gold discoveries, a young Canadian, Samuel McGowan, a former student of Morse and now an
experienced telegrapher and entrepreneur, arrived in Melbourne equipped with several sets of Morse
instruments, batteries and insulators, to introduce telegraph technology to Australia.
BY ANN MOYAL
“W
E CALL the electric telegraph the
most perfect invention of modern
times”, enthused the Melbourne
Argus that June and, accustomed
to the slow percolation of news and communication by
mail since first settlement, declared briskly, “Let us set
about telegraphy at once”.
McGowan himself had plans to build a private
telegraph system between Melbourne and the thriving
diggings of Bendigo and Ballarat and to connect
Melbourne to its neighbouring colonies. But
government intervention swiftly forestalled the growth
of privately sponsored telegraphy in Australia.
Rather, McGowan became the active general
superintendent of telegraphs of Victoria and within
three years had webbed the colony with a network of
overhead telegraph lines that stretched from
76 Australian Heritage
Melbourne to Geelong, north to the goldfields, west to
Portland near the South Australian border, and north
and north-west to Wangaratta and the Murray River.
Its wooden poles were cut from the tallest trees and
strung with imported British wire, its insulators made
locally from shellac and tar.
Victoria’s initiative stirred other colonies. By 1854,
the government of South Australia was soliciting a
suitable appointee from London, a move that bought
ABOVE: Burra Telegraph Station and Post Office, built in 1861
and today serving as the Burra Regional Art Gallery. It was from
this office on 16 December 1862 that John McDouall Stuart
telegraphed to Adelaide the news that he had completed the first
crossing of the continent from south to north. Stuart’s route was
used for the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line from
Port Augusta in 1872.
them Charles Todd who arrived highly
qualified from Greenwich Observatory late
in 1855.
With him he brought British telegraph
technology, an array of telegraphic plant,
his young wife Alice, a technical assistant,
E C Cracknell, and dreams of extending
telegraph links between the seats of
government in the colonies and, in time,
connecting the vast southern continent by
submarine cable via Asia and India to Britain.
Todd began work at once, completing a line
from Adelaide to Semaphore in two short
months. Most vital to the colony,
however, was his plan for an
intercolonial telegraph
connection with
Melbourne. He visited
McGowan in Melbourne
and it was agreed that the
line should be built as
one uniform system using
Morse technology (Todd
discarding his British
undergrounding technique), the
advancing Victorian line extending to
the South Australian border, and Todd
building a line over 500 miles from Adelaide to
join it.
Strung securely above the ground, the AdelaideMelbourne electric telegraph line was begun in August
1857 and opened in July the following year..
In contrast to its southern neighbours, New South
Wales was slower and more cautious in its response to
the revolutionary new telegraph system. But, under
pressure from McGowan, the NSW government began
to push out local lines and in January 1858 acquired
Todd’s technical assistant, E C Cracknell, to become
their long-term general superintendent of telegraphs.
Cracknell completed the Sydney to Albury line to
connect with the Melbourne–Albury line in October
1858, a brief few months after Todd’s completion of the
Adelaide-Victoria stretch.
Queensland participated in the spreading
telecommunication nexus in 1861 and, in a tradition of
family interconnections that quickly grew up within
the system, added Cracknell’s brother, W C Cracknell,
as superintendent of telegraphs in Brisbane in 1863. As
lines stretched and the manned repeater stations
required to transmit the weakening electric signals
spanned out to spur the growth of country towns, many
country postmistresses found a congenial husband
among the smart new company of telegraphists being
trained in every colony.
Tasmania, early eager for connection with her sister
colonies, began pioneering plans for a submarine cable
link across Bass Strait in 1857, the same year that
Hobart was joined by telegraph to Launceston.
LEFT: An early telegraph operator’s desk,
part of the collection of the Victorian
Telecommunications Museum. The sounder,
which produces the ‘dit-dah’ Morse code
sounds that must be interpreted and
recorded by the operator, is mounted in a
resonator box that directs the sound towards
the operator. Messages were tapped out in
Morse code on the Morse key. The unit was
powered by simple electrolyte battery in a
ceramic jar.
The gleaming, well-insulated copper
cable was uncoiled and dropped
overboard by ship from Cape Otway
in Victoria to come ashore at King
Island and Three Hummock Island
and join Tasmanian telegraphy at
Circular Head near Stanley.
From there it linked to Low
Head and was joined with
Launceston where the
Launceston-Hobart line was run
by brothers in one service, G B
Butcher in Launceston and W H
Butcher in Hobart.
One hundred and seventeen
miles in length, it was a
technological first, the longest submarine cable yet
laid. With significant advances in cable technology, a
second cable was laid across Bass Strait direct to Low
Head from Flinders, Victoria, in 1869.
Portrait of Samuel McGowan, Royal Historical Society of
Victoria.
Australian Heritage 77
By the 1860s a distinctive new pattern was emerging
in Australia. The countryside was ringed around by
singing lines, concentrated about the capital cities and
market towns, the goldfields, and the denser
agricultural and pastoral settlements while smaller
towns were channelled into the telegraphic arteries that
bridged the capitals.
Australians took to the new technology like ducks to
water. Nearly 4,000 telegrams were despatched in the
first year of operation in Victoria in 1854. Telegram
rates were set at one shilling and sixpence for ten words
for the first 10 miles, but rose steeply for distances over
20, 50 and 100 miles.
By 1856 telegram transmissions in Victoria had
tripled and, despite its heavy contemporary cost, the
telegraph system was feeding into the colonies’
burgeoning economic development. The pattern was
similar elsewhere.
Colonial statistics confirmed that the new technology
had rapidly become a vital instrument of both
government and business. Governments used the
telegraph for issuing orders, transferring public servants,
conveying legal judgments and directives and, in police
hands, tracking scoundrels and criminals.
In business the rapid dot-dash of the Morse code
tapped out prosperity and wealth. In every colony, city
and country town, telegraph offices became the
commissioning points for orders, linking trade and
commerce, connecting investors with markets, gold
diggers with buyers, dispersing news, and adding its
special dynamism to colonial society.
Only Western Australia, the continent’s great
‘western third’ with its small seaboard population,
Sir Charles Todd, engraving by G W McLeod, c 1886.
lagged behind, indifferent to the relevance of the
telegraph and its rapid intercolonial growth.
When they participated early in 1869, it was not
government but private initiative that drove them on,
propelled by the Perth newspaper proprietor, Edmund
Stirling, who offered to manage a line between Perth
and Fremantle if the government
provided labour to erect it.
Hence, by a gentle irony, it was
Western Australia, a colony that had
stoutly resisted convict
transportation until a chronic labour
shortage forced their late acceptance
during 1850–68, that became the
only Australian colony to employ
convict labour, along with penal
Aboriginal labour, in the
construction of a telegraph line.
Telegraph connection between
Perth and Albany and to Bunbury,
York and Tooday followed in the
early ’70s and in 1873 James
Fleming, ex-convict and ticket-ofleave man, became the first
superintendent of telegraphs in
the colony.
The great East-West Telegraph
Line, long pressed for by Todd, began
from Albany in 1875 to edge its
Telegraph Office, Williamstown, 1858, built by Samuel McGowan for Australia’s first
challenging way by sea transport
telegraph line from Melbourne to Williamstown. State Library of Victoria, Image number
around the Great Australian Bight.
IMN30/01/58/57.
78 Australian Heritage
There, at Bremer Bay, Esperance Bay, Israelite Bay and
Eyre, the poles, equipment and stores were ferried
ashore to be winched up the sharp perpendicular cliffs
by derricks to establish transmitter stations.
The line from Eyre to the South Australian border
connection was completed at Eucla in 1877. Western
Australia had joined its fellow colonies.
Business was the stick that prodded the telegraph out
and across increasingly difficult landscapes. In
Tasmania, the gold discoveries at Mangana and
Waterhouse in 1870 and ’71, and the tin finds at Mt
Bischoff later that year, forced extensions, while the
opening of other fields in the island’s mountainous west
speeded the stretching telegraphic links.
In Queensland W J Cracknell, having established a
line from Brisbane north as far as Cardwell on the coast
by 1869, was moved by political aspirations to prepare
for a cross-country link overland the 450 miles from
Cardwell to Burketown (near Normanton) on the Gulf
of Carpentaria with the ambitious (but eventually
dashed) hope of bringing the contemplated
international cable link to Australia through
Queensland.
While costs varied from one colony to the next, they
rose proportionately everywhere with distance from the
centre and the remoter settlers paid much more for
long-distance communication than their city cousins.
Nonetheless the telegraph’s impact on rural affairs
was profound. In the rich Western District of Victoria,
where pastoral transactions often involved the largescale movement of flocks, pastoralists’ diaries confirmed
that these men had early recourse to the telegraph in
the major movements of their herds from New South
Wales and Queensland.
“I found the telegraph service indispensable”, one
wrote, “when arrangements for the herds’ management
had to be altered and made”. They also benefited from
telegraphed newspaper reports of stock prices.
But nowhere was the impact of the new technology
more evident than on the business of communication
itself. As lines stretched, city and provincial
newspapers began to publish a few inches each day, bylined ‘By electric telegraph’, bringing intelligence from
neighbouring colonies, news of the movement of
shipping, the price of goods, reports from parliament,
and whenever possible, sporting events to its readers.
In turn, media needs spurred telegraph development.
Until the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line
in 1872, overseas news was telegraphed from Adelaide,
as the first point of shipping entry with telegraphic
access to the eastern colonies, a situation that gave that
city a great strategic and financial boost.
With only one line, there was considerable rivalry
between Melbourne and Sydney newspapers to secure
first possession of the wire and long chapters of the
bible were not infrequently despatched, at great cost,
while the paper’s correspondent compiled his news
report.
By 1859 the pressure on one line was so great that
Todd completed a second intercolonial line from
Adelaide to Melbourne via Wellington, New South
Wales, in 1861, together with a duplicate line direct to
Melbourne. A direct line from Adelaide to Sydney
opened in 1867.
Yet this ‘most perfect invention’ also served a wider
social need. There was something about the laconic
staccato style of Australian communication that
seemed to chime with the new technology.
The Operating Room and staff at the ‘new’ Eucla Telegraph Station, 1905. State Library of South Australia, B54161.
Australian Heritage 79
Camel cart outside the Eucla Telegraph Station, near the SA/WA
border, 1907. This fine stone building which replaced the first
wooden telegraph station is now in ruins beneath a sand dune. State
Library of South Australia B13777.
telegraphist “must be well in touch with the politician,
the sportsman and the man of commerce; and after
becoming an expert manipulator of the keys, he must
acquaint himself with technical duties. It should also be
remembered that the most delicate and momentous
secrets are entrusted to his discretion, and his work is of
a highly confidential character”.
Telegraphists were an elite. In city and suburban post
and telegraph offices they occupied a position between
the classes of telegraph messenger, letter carrier and
postal sorter, and the managerial classes of supervisors,
postmasters and superintendents. But their training and
skills, and the sense of commitment that their duties
inspired, turned them into a cohesive group with
conventions and ‘in-house’ codes and jokes, and a deep
sense of camaraderie.
Better educated than most other members of the
public service, urban telegraphists showed their middle
class alliance by dressing fashionably. Dapper in gloves
and brightly coloured waistcoats, they completed their
ensemble with a cane. Even in the inland’s torrid heat,
there were few concessions to comfortable dress.
Men who wended their way overland on horseback to
remote rural repeater stations were workers of
extraordinary commitment moulded into assiduous and
solitary habits. Yet mateship flourished along the lines.
In the busy telegraph border station at Eucla,
telegraphists were able to form a social community from
the two sets of men representing Western and South
Australia who faced each other on respective sides of
the operating table. There, sartorially correct in flannel
trousers, white shirts, ties and waistcoats, they took
down the Morse signals tapped out from their capitals
in differing telegraph alphabets, decoding them, and
passing the written message through ‘hand holes’ in the
head-high partition to their opposite number. Clocks
Given its cost, the sending of personal telegrams was
kept to a minimum wordage and, for many years, dealt
only with the great occasions of human life – birth,
illness, death and marriage – which, when transmission
proved less than perfect, could lead to some
misunderstanding. “Come home at once”, urged one
message, “father bad”. Another family was alerted by
the gay, if mysterious words, “Mother sailing past”, and
yet another, clearly eager for news, heard that “Bert at
last tarried with Elsa”.
Good Morse training was essential. Telegraphists,
both urban and country, made up a distinctive new
profession in colonial society. Drawn usually from welleducated or aspiring backgrounds, the recruits grew out
of the new technology, developed technical skills, and
often possessed scientific knowledge and some
scholarly attainments.
“The telegraph
operator’s is brain
work, requiring close
and unremitting
application”, one writer
summed up the new
calling. “The mental
effort involved in
receiving from a
sounder was exactly
similar to that in which
a shorthand writer was
engaged when
reporting a speaker
verbatim and it took as
long to train a good
telegraph operator as it
did a good reporter”.
But there was more.
In order to do his work Laying of the Tasmanian end of the cable between Tasmania and Victoria, June 1869. State Library of
intelligently, the
Victoria, Image number IAN19/06/69/125.
80 Australian Heritage
Science also shared the
benefits of the new technology.
Charles Todd used his position
as both Superintendent of
Telegraphs and Government
Astronomer in South Australia
to place weather stations in the
hands of country post and
telegraph officers with
instructions to gather precise
information on climate, winds,
rain and storms. From the
1860s, the intercolonial
telegraph lines served to
circulate information of storms
and weather and to build up a
telegraphic meteorological
service with the cooperation of
other Colonial Government
Astronomers.
Todd also used his British
experience of establishing
Instrument room, new Telegraph Office on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets, Melbourne,
longitude by telegraph, when in
engraving by Samuel Calvert, published in the Illustrated Australian News for home readers, 1868, with the help of the
October 10, 1872. State Library of Victoria, Image number IAN10/10/72/204.
Government astronomers in
Victoria and New South Wales
monitored the different colonial times, 90 minutes
and free access to those colonies’ telegraph lines, he
apart, and the transcribed messages were transmitted
made an accurate determination of the 141st degree of
onwards.
east longitude to give more precise definition to the
boundary line between South Australia and Victoria.
The telegraph system itself had made it possible to
For this telegraph, lines were linked to Sydney
keep the time of the nation. Time signals were
Observatory and to Melbourne’s Williamstown, the two
transmitted to all telegraph stations throughout each
observatories connected by direct circuit, and the
colony at one o’clock every day. Lines were kept clear
transit of fifteen selected stars observed and recorded on
for the transmission and clocks were provided in all
the Melbourne chronograph via information
cities and more important country post and telegraph
transmitted to Melbourne. To general satisfaction, ‘a
offices.
true boundary’ was established.
The role of linesmen in the rise of telegraphy in
The telegraph and the thousands of men (women
Australia was crucial. They were the remarkable
would
wait for the advent of telephony) who pioneered,
workforce which, in all the vastly differing and often
constructed,
maintained, and developed its diverse
highly challenging environments and weather of the
applications,
had ushered in an entirely new era in
Australian colonies, carried the infrastructure of the
Colonial
affairs.
new technology out from cities and suburbs into the
far reaches of ‘a country of magnificent distances’ and
The Overland Telegraph Line joining Adelaide to
impressed it on the nation.
Darwin, with its cable link to Asia and the world,
completed in two short years by Todd and his teams in
Plunging through harsh arid hinterlands, scaling
1872, further vastly transformed colonial life,
jagged mountains, fording rivers, erecting poles (the
commerce, administration, business, politics, and
expected average was 70 poles a day), wires, repairing
intercolonial communication and relations, and marked
insulators, plodding through snowfields, storms and
the greatest technological feat in Australia in the
floods, drying wooden telegraph poles by a campfire at
nineteenth century. But that is a story for another issue
night, living rough, eating ‘wildlife and bacon’, this
of Australian Heritage.
rugged corps of men experienced conditions that called
on reserves of diligence, toughness, endurance and
The Author
pluck.
Dr Ann Moyal AM is a leading historian of
Telegraphy in all its manifestations of extension, use
Australian science and technology. Her many books
and human endeavour was undoubtedly the most
include Clear Across Australia. A history of
glamorous technology of the nineteenth century in
telecommunications (Thomas Nelson Australia,
Australia and, geographically and socially, brought its
Melbourne, 1984), from which this article is drawn. ◆
scattered people closer together.