Australian telegraphic history
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Australia was a relatively early adopter of telegraph technology in the middle nineteenth century, despite its low population densities and the difficult conditions sometimes encountered in laying lines. From 1858 onwards, the major capitals were progressively linked, culminating in the addition of Perth in 1877. Australia was linked to the rest of the world for the first time in 1872, through the Overland Telegraph which ran some 3200 km from Adelaide through to Darwin. The network continued to expand in size and sophistication until 1959 and in usage until 1945, after which time telephone usage began to erode public patronage of telegraphy services. The final publicly provided telegraphy service was closed in 1993.
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[edit] Beginnings and colonial capital linkages
Australia's first telegraph line, sponsored by the Victorian Government, was erected between Melbourne and Williamstown in 1853 and 1854 by Samuel McGowan, a recently immigrated Canadian telegrapher. The line covered a distance of 17 km and went into operation in March 1854, less than 10 years after the opening of the first public telegraph line in the world (linking Baltimore and Washington DC). The line was subsequently extended to Geelong and Ballarat in the same year. By 1857 Victoria had been extensively networked by telegraph lines, including a line reaching to Portland, near the South Australian state border.
In July 1858 a line opened connecting Adelaide and Melbourne, including a 300 km South Australian section built at that colony’s expense, under the direction Charles Todd, the recently arrived superintendent of telegraphs. In October 1858 Sydney was connected to Melbourne (and thereby Adelaide) via a line constructed from Liverpool to Albury. Brisbane was added to the telegraph chain (via Sydney) in November 1861.
In 1867 the first direct line linking Adelaide and Sydney was opened. In 1869, following a short lived (two years) cable laid in 1859, an enduring cable link was established between Cape Otway on the Victorian mid-south coast, through to King Island and, ultimately, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia's southern most and only non-coterminous state.
[edit] Connections to the outside world and the Overland Telegraph
Charles Todd and Samuel McGowan both envisaged telegraph links to England via India and saw the creation of an inter-colonial network as being preliminary to that ambition. From 1858 the prospect of a cable being laid from Britain to Australia began to generate competition within the Australian colonies for landing rights.
In 1869 the Queensland colonial government established a cable across the southern intersect of Cape York peninsula in preparation for a connection with a then envisaged cable, linking Australia to England via India, Singapore and Java. In the event the South Australian colonial government successfully out manoeuvred Queensland in a bid to secure landing rights with an offer to finance the cost of a telegraph from Port Augusta to Port Darwin (at that time South Australia administered what was to become the Northern Territory). A contract was let in 1870 and, following immense physical hardship and considerable logistical challenge, the Overland Telegraph (the Port Augusta to Port Darwin line) was completed on 22 August 1872. (with the cable to England being restored to operation in October of that year following a four month breakage in it. The cable had been initially brought ashore at Darwin in November 1871, with Australia’s first international telecommunications message being received on 19 November of that year).
[edit] The line to Perth
In 1874 the Western and South Australian legislatures voted the sums necessary for the construction of a Port Augusta to Albury line. Work began in April of the next year. The two lines met at Eucla, a location close to the Western Australia/South Australia border having encountered very substantial hardships and logistical challenges during construction. The line became operational on 8 December 1877. The Port Augusta-Albury line remained in use until 1927 when it was abandoned.
[edit] Post Federation: peak and decline
Following the Federation of Australia (in 1901) and the establishment of the Postmaster-General's Department (a Federal Government Department, in modern parlance) telegraphic equipment was progressively improved. In 1905, the use of Wheatstone equipment on the Adelaide and Perth routes improved speed to 220 words per minute. By 1922, the Murray Multiplex System allowed one line to be used for eight transmissions at the speed of fifty words per transmission per minute.
Telegram usage continued to climb, peaking at 35 million messages per annum in 1945. Thereafter, the telephone continuously eroded the popularity of telegrams, both because of relative price of the two services and network service improvements. Additionally, from 1954, teleprinters handled more and more traffic. In 1959, an automated switching system (TRESS) further enhanced the utility of teleprinters by allowing mesages that were centrally directed to be automatically retransmitted to their final destination without the need for a human operator. The last telegraph message sent exclusively by land line was sent to Wyndham and Halls Creek in mid-1963, and the final mesasge using a land line for any section of its passage was sent in 1964.
By 1975 telegram usage had halved from its 1945 level and in 1993 Australia Post discontinued its letter-gram service, which consisted of postage delivery "telegrams", that is, messages typed as per genuine telegrams, and delivered in the same manner (although never transmitted over telegraph lines).
