DAVID DUFTY Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress

Many great men are remembered for only one thing, and for Charles Todd it is building the Overland Telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin in the 1870s.

David Dufty’s book Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession is not a biography but rather a venture story set against the background of the rapid development of telegraphy and the opening up of the Australian continent.

Within a generation, what began in 1837 with Professor Charles Wheatstone sending telegraph messages from London’s Euston Square Railway Station to his co-inventor William Cooke at Camden Town Railway Station a mile and a quarter away, had transformed mass communication as wires crossed cities, countries and continents, and cables ran beneath the oceans. Edward John Eyre had explored the Australian coastline from Adelaide to Albany in 1840-41, Burke and Wills reached the salty marshes of the Gulf of Carpentaria before perishing on their return journey in 1861, and John McDouall Stuart, on his third expedition heading north from Adelaide, reached the mouth of the Mary River near present-day Darwin in 1862.

Todd was a young man in a hurry. Mathematically gifted, as the son of a grocer he did not attend either Oxford or Cambridge universities, but at age 14 was apprenticed to the Royal Astronomer George Airy at Greenwich. At 22 he was the assistant astronomer at the Cambridge Observatory, and at 25, along with his former boss, attended London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, where he was excited by scientific advances, including telegraphy. When the South Australian Governor asked the Colonial Office to recommend someone for the position of Colonial Astronomer and Telegrapher, the request was passed on to Airy, who contacted the 29-year-old Todd. He wasted little time signing an employment contract that paid him £400 a year, six times his current salary.

Dufty tells how Todd hit the ground running after arriving in Adelaide in 1855. Within four months he had overseen the construction of a public telegraph line between the city and Port Adelaide, and within a year had surveyed a line to Melbourne. The linking of the east and west coasts of the United States by cable in October 1861 inspired three options for connecting Java to Brisbane in 1869 before Todd suggested a north-south transcontinental line to the British Australian Telegraph Company, and offered the sweetener of the SA government paying for the entire line at a cost of £120,000. The company accepted the deal on condition the job was completed by 1 January 1872 and, despite scepticism of Todd’s estimates, the bill was passed.

Dufty writes dramatically of the challenges Todd faced.

It was insanity. Sure, one exploration party had crossed the continent and returned eight years earlier, but nobody had done it since. John McDouall Stuart’s maps were insufficient for the task because he had travelled light, on horseback, and the track he took could not be taken by wagons and bullock teams … There were deserts of sand, deserts of glassy stones, deserts of clay, as well as salt plains, mulga plains, grass plains. There were mountain ranges and twisting gorges. Further north were swamps and bogs, and rivers broke their banks and flooded every year in the wet season. There were also Aboriginal people, who varied greatly in their attitudes to strangers and interlopers who used their waterholes and invaded their traditional hunting grounds.

Todd’s plan was a gamble. It is a wonder that he is now lauded as a visionary and not derided as a fool.

It’s because he succeeded.

The story is conveyed in 61 brisk chapters (many only two or three pages) as the 2000-mile (3200 kilometre) line is divided into three sections – Southern, managed by EM Bagot, which was completed on time and on budget; Northern, originally tendered to businessmen Joseph Darwent and William Dalwood, which would run into the most problems; and Central, to be managed by Todd, the ‘remotest driest section of the line, through unknown terrain’. Normally the short chapters might be viewed as a scatter-gun approach to the material, but they work to plot the progress (or lack of it) in different locations month by month.

The timeline is important because the South Australian government had to pay the British Australian Telegraph Company £70 a day for every day the line was incomplete – around £2000 per month. There were problems aplenty. In the Central section Todd employed John Ross, reputedly the colony’s best explorer, to find a suitable route for the line beyond the MacDonnell Ranges, but Ross proved prone to losing objects (including Stuart’s maps) and losing his way. The main difficulties in the north, however, were both environmental and human.

Four attempts had been made to establish settlements: two in north-east Arnhem Land, one on Melville Island, and one at Escape Cliffs at the mouth of the Adelaide River, before being abandoned. It was not until 1869 that SA Surveyor-General George Goyder surveyed a suitable site at Port Darwin. The human problems began with the first Government Resident, William Douglas, whose brief was to prepare the settlement for the landing of a submarine cable and the construction of an overland telegraph, but instead built a comfortable stone house for himself and his family. Instructions to build a wharf and establish an experimental plant nursery were allowed to lapse. When the steamers Omeo and St Magnus arrived in Port Darwin in September 1870, the means of unloading cargo was arduous:

The horses on the ships were loosely tethered and pushed into the water. They swam behind a boat, two at a time, to the shore. The next day, the bullocks came ashore in similar fashion. At the same time, other boats ferried between the ships and the shore, bringing equipment and stores.

Work began immediately with the first poles planted, but when the Omeo chugged out of port two days later, manager William Paqualin and government overseer William McMinn ‘acting as Todd’s eyes and ears’ became rivals in the battle for control. While the poles were erected for 90 miles to Southport by early November, McMinn began to regard Paqualin’s management as slipshod and cavalier. Worried about supply lines the further the crews got from Port Darwin, he investigated the navigation of the Roper River to establish whether it was a viable means of shipping supplies. The wet season exacerbated Paqualin’s problems. Flies produced infections known as ‘bung-eyes’, humidity produced heat rashes, wasps and green ants nested in trees and fell on the heads of axe men when trees were lopped, and mosquitoes brought the worst of all afflictions – malaria. When steady rain continued at Katharine River in late February 1871 and poling for 10 days in boggy ground resulted in only 12 miles of progress, nearly half the sick and hungry workers quit. McMinn declared Darwent and Dalwood’s contract (and Paqualin’s management) null and void two months later.

Dufty suggests that McMinn had reason to believe he would be appointed to run the northern contract in Darwent and Dalwood’s place, but lost to railway engineer Robert Patterson, who was appointed by Premier John Hart. ‘There was no committee, no selection panel, and no interview. Hart simply made the decision.’ Patterson was a poor choice as he sometimes made rash decisions while otherwise dithering and prevaricating. He was also a vain man who sought to undermine Todd, cancelling his orders and, worst of all, seeking glory at Iron Ponds on 22 August 1872 by cutting the wire that linked Adelaide to Port Darwin.

Dufty writes that it’s unclear when Patterson had cut the wire and surmises that by rejoining it he believed he had connected Australia to the world. Quite properly, though, this would be no Neil Armstrong moment for Patterson, as history has recognised Todd for driving the project through four colonial premiers – Henry Strangways, John Hart, Arthur Blyth and Henry Ayers – as well as overseeing construction.

Dufty provides an elegaic ending to his account:

The pace of change in communication sped up. After telegraph, there was revolution after exciting revolution: telephones; television; satellites; mobile phones; the internet. Telegraph modernised too, but it lost ground each year to newcomers. It faded away so gradually that when it ended, sometime in the 1980s (it’s not clear exactly when), nobody noticed, because nobody used it anymore. Today, there are more underwater cables than ever, but they are fibre-optic internet cables. The original Darwin-to-Java telegraph cable rots on the ocean floor connected to nothing. The telegraph exists no more.

Because the story is writ on such a large geographical canvas, 15 maps ease the reader’s task and I found myself making constant reference to them. An excellent selection of photographic plates depicting such scenes as the planting of the first pole in Darwin in 1870, three ships at Roper River in early 1872, the Port Darwin telegraph station in 1875, and Todd with staff at the post and telegraph office in Adelaide, also prove an important complement to the text.

David Dufty has done a fine job in narrating a great story in such a vivid way.

David Dufty Charles Todd’s Magnificent Obsession: The epic race to connect Australia to the world Allen & Unwin 2024 PB 368pp $34.99

Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is SA Footy Stars of the Past available from www.lulu.com/spotlight/bernardwhimpress

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Tags: Australian history, British Australian Telegraph Company, Charles Todd, David | Dufty, EM Bagot, George Goyder, Joseph Darwent, Overland Telegraph, William Dalwood, William Douglas, William McMinn, William Paqualin