The Australian Overland Telegraph Line was an electrical telegraph system for sending messages the 3200 kilometres (2000 miles) between Darwin, in what is now the Northern Territory of Australia, and Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.
Completed in 1872 (with a line to Western Australia added in 1877), it allowed fast communication between Australia and the rest of the world. When it was linked to the Java-to-Darwin submarine telegraph cable several months later, the communication time with Europe dropped from months to hours; Australia was no longer so isolated from the rest of the world.
Not only did the Overland Telegraph provide communications to civilians for the first time, Australian journalists no longer needed to wait weeks (or months) for news from Europe or the America’s to arrive via ship. Australia was now connected to the ‘wire services’.
Competition between the colonies over the route was fierce.
The Victorian government organised an expedition led by Burke and Wills to cross the continent from Menindee to the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1860.
Although the route was traversed, the expedition ended in disaster. The South Australian government recognised the economic benefits that would result from becoming the centre of the telegraph network. It offered a reward of £2000 to encourage an expedition to find a route between South Australia and the north coast.
The line was one of the great engineering feats of 19th-century Australia and probably the most significant milestone in the history of telegraphy in Australia.
