The Great Work.
Andrew Crouch.
ISBN 978-1-875778-74-4, (New, 2025), 160x240, French flap SC, 167 pages, well illustrated, maps, 480 grams, $60.00*
With only John McDouall Stuart’s exploration journal to guide and underpin its crazy-brave endeavour, the South Australian Government staked its political survival on a plan to carry a line of telegraph overland across the continent, to connect Australia to the World.
Despite significant challenges, the northbound Overland Telegraph construction parties made steady progress from Port Augusta, reaching the Centre of Australia after eight months ‘on the road’.
Their counterparts building south from Port Darwin were under-equipped, short of supplies, and largely out of touch with the outside world. Confronted in turn by flooded rivers and an inflexible Government inspector, their expedition nearly collapsed. A year on, after two successive waves of reinforcements and months waiting for the monsoon waters to subside, they got under way again.
Aboriginal people who watched and sometimes resisted the encroachment on their lands and livelihoods were greatly outmatched in weaponry and could only hope to counter by stealing items that might be of use to them.
Meanwhile, the completion deadline had passed, and great commercial pressure was being applied by the British cable magnates. Then suddenly the tables were turned when their underwater cable broke down near Java.
And two months later in August 1872, the ‘fragile line of matchsticks’ was finally completed, linking coast to coast across the continent.
This is the true story as chronicled by the people who together created the Overland Telegraph Line. Drawing on his own careful transcriptions, author Andrew Crouch blends the protagonists’ handwritten accounts to trace the genesis, the day-to-day progress and the eventual triumph of The Great Work from beginning to end. [NT][BIO][EX]