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Published: March 3rd 2007
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now where did I leave off...
Oh yes, walking to the Telegraph Station.
It was a cool walk, and very pretty. The Todd River quite fascinates me, and I followed its sandy course all the way to the Station.
The Station is the first (and 2nd through to around 12th) building(s) built in "Alice Springs", although these days it's actually about 4km out of town. In fact, the buildings were there not as a suitable place to put a town, but as a suitable place to run the Overland Telegraph Line, and put a boosting station. The Overland Telegraph represents the connection of Australia to the world, via the undersea link from Indonesia to Darwin. It ran the entire breadth of the Country, from Adelaide to Darwin, and was built in ridiculous speed; from July 1870 to November1872. The Station at Alice was started as in July 1871. in those days the main town of the outback was Oodnadatta, further south, where the Overland train (yes, now the Ghan), finished. The Railhead didn't move up to Alice until near the start of the Second World War (Ok, checked Wiki: 1929 My original information came from Nevil Shute's
A town Like Alice, which isn't about Alice Springs at all. It;'s about Willstown, in QLD).
The first building was U-shaped, easily defensible, with gun ports facing all sides. The subsequent buildings, including the Telegraph Station itself and the eventual residence were much more sensibly laid out, given that the local indigenes proved very much to be friendly.
This was where the post came to, and this was also where telegraphed messages were sent. There were stations like this all up and down the line, because given the power they could put through the wires, the messages never went very far. So each station had to recieve them, then send them on, Kind of like a very serious game of Chinese Whispers.
They used their own battery supply (A Daniel Cell, or early type of wet-cell battery, which was made to look something like a giant lightglobe.) The batteries supplied about twenty three volts, with another bank as a reserve, and a third bank recharging (they didn't go into how they recharge them... I wonder...) They took up an entire room, about 7m by 5m.
There was also a governess' lodgings, a forge/smithy, carriage house, and quarters for
the (black) servants. There was also a curious device to measure humidity, and hence, evaporation. Apparently the average yearly evaporation is 3m out here.
In 1932 the station was moved into town, where it was more accessable for the locals. The booster stations were no longer needed, as enough power could be sent along the lines to reach through. Enough power was coming along the lines by then, to actually carry voice.
The station wasn't long abandoned, however. It soon became a boarding house and school for children of "uncertain parentage". The fact that frequently the mothers were known, it was merely that the fathers were white, didn't stop the local europeans from rounding up what were to become the first of the Stolen Generation. The children often never saw their parents again, and were frequently shipped off to become a minor servant at age 11 or 12, after the most rudimentary schooling and instruction in European modes of behaviour. White man at the time saw their mission as meciful: these children were not accepted into the white population, and it was therefore assumed that they would not be accepted into the local indigenous communities; the authorities thought
From the Trigg Station
Note I am wearing one of my Morocco Tops. The Desert strikes again! they were giving them a lease on life, a real chance. That, I think, is what is so tragic about the Stolen Generation.
After wandering around there for quite a while, I headed up to the Trig Station behind the Telegraph Station. It was not as big a walk as that up ANZAC hill, but I sat and looked around at the alien landscape before me for a long while never-the-less. Surveyors first came through Alice Springs in 1877. Which is six year after the Overland Telegraph came through. I wonder how they built it without surveying the ground first?
Around the telegraph station is a picnic ground. It is watered by the Nearby Alice Spring, the water for which the township eventually got its name. It's not actually a spring, just the river bed gets low enough (or the granite below it gets high enough) that water is exposed from the normally upside down flowing river. Surround ing the picnic ground is desert, the usual, harsh, uncompromising yellow and red, but the ground itself is full of lush green grass. And Parrots, and my friend, the Wedge Tail Eagle.
My walk back was through the
desert. It was another four K's, and eventually wound out near the inner suburbs of Alice Springs. The landscape is amazing. It's all dryscrub, and rocks and a bit of sand, more yellow than red in this area (although the rocks on the way to the Station were red enough. It was tough walking, and I was very thirsty, even having plenty of water to drink, and feeling a bit sick and woozy by the time I came out.
It was about halfway through the park, and I was looking around a bit, thinking that this was the sort of landscape a terra-formed Mars would have (if the scrub could put up with the cold). For no particular reason I stopped examining the rocky hill to the right, looked to the left, and there, not three feet from me, was a wallaby. When I stopped it started to bound away, but it was close enough that I almost had to dodge its tail as it turned away from me. That was cool.
I got back into town at about 11am, and the Todd Mall Markets were in full swing. I bought some books to read, and I bought
Kangaroo
The Wallaby, now at a further, and evidently safe remove. I wasn't fast enough when he was *this* close to me. some early lunch, and wandered through disinterestedly (Sunday markets are like sunday markets everywhere: there were more crocheted toilet roll covers than aboriginal artwork), but the lunch made me feel sick again.
Correctly diagnosing heat exhaustion, I walked slowly home, and curled up for the rest of the day with plenty of water and one of those books I'd found (
Eldest by Christopher Paolini, if you're interested. Rip-roaring read, but nothing new in the genre), until I was tired enough to sleep.
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Vilija
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Love reading your stories, keep them coming! :-)