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I'm in the YHA in Alice Springs a former theatre. Alice is nice, its pretty red, with some flashes of green. A river runs through it; about once every 30 years. Your thought to be a real local if you've seen the Todd river run three times. Not many people qualify I think.

Alice Springs Telegraph Station

A brief History of he NT.

Australia is big, and was a whole bunch of competing British colonies. Well the edges were. The centre of the continent was unexplored. The optimists of the day thought there was an inland sea here, not a desert at all.

The truth was finally revealed by a bloke called Stewart. Who in 1861* finally succeeded in crossing the continent. The road I've just driven half way down is the Stewart Highway. It was an epic trip. At about this time South Australia NSW, QLD etc. were setting up telegraph networks.

The telegraph network extend all the way from Europe to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). However news sill took months to get to Australia. Bummer.

Essentially the whole centre of Australia was built on one thin piece of wire. In 1872, a cable was laid under the sea to the new colony in Darwin.  That just left the minor task of laying 3000kn of wire from Adelaide. A route only Stewart and presumably his party had managed.

Many of the places up the Stewart Highway we stopped at - and there's precious little else, are old relay stations for the Telegraph. Their creation opened up Central Australia. Something the aborigines are probably still regretting. Daly Waters, Tenants Creek, Elliot, Alice, Pine Creek. All these "towns" stated off a repeater stations, nothing more.

Pretty much every thing followed the old telegraph line. The road, people, cattle, all follows it. WWII saw the Japanese bomb Darwin. As the war effort kicked in, the road north got massively developed. As did the air fields, first used by the early pioneers to get across the continent and on too London. As the population, all in the south, headed north for the war.

The reason we stayed on the highway was mostly because there's nothing else.