The Longest Wire

by Hugh Atkinson

Angus & Robertson, 1982 [First Edition], ISBN 0207148325, hardcover, dust-jacket

Very Good Condition, a little edge and shelf wear a little rubbing to edges and corners, no inscriptions, dust-jacket shows a little edge and shelf wear with a little rubbing to edges and corners (see photographs)

"Before the completion in 1872 of the Overland Telegraph Line between Adelaide and Darwin, Australia's communications with the rest of the world were scanty and haphazard.  A letter took three months and more to reach London from Australia.  News was out of date by the time it arrived.  Relatives could be dead and buried before the letter mentioning their illness was received...
Yet when the idea of an Overland Telegraph was first mooted in Adelaide, many old sages shook their heads.  Why, the very idea - building a telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin, nearly two thousand miles long, through terrain that had taken the lives of Burke and Wills, and Leichhardt, and tried Stuart tot he limit three times before he managed to struggle back from the northern sea - the idea was preposterous.  Tens of thousands of poles to be erected across gibber plains and desert and swamp and jungle - it was lunacy, sheer lunacy."