We chat with David Dufty about his book, Charles Todd's Magnificent Obsession.
A&U: Hi David. Thank you so much for speaking with us. What inspired you to write about the Overland Telegraph project?
DD: This is a huge, sweeping story with colourful characters, rivalries, tragedy, triumph, and plenty of drama. It’s not just the backdrop to history, this is a big historical story in its own right. Building the overland line was an objectively major Australian achievement, with a profound impact on life in the Australian colonies. It was the inland version of the First Fleet, opening up the interior in a rapid and organised way, permanently changing the lives and societies of remote indigenous communities throughout the centre.
A&U: How did you balance historical accuracy with creating an engaging narrative for readers?
DD: I don’t compromise on historical accuracy. To give one example, a lot of historians like to invent plausible dialog or describe what someone probably looked like. I understand the reasons for that, and some writers have explicit rules and limits for their plausible interpolations, but I don’t do that. I’ve learned that if I dig hard enough, I can find as much interesting, rich detail as I need for an immersive story.
An engaging historical narrative vividly portrays people and places, puts everything in a larger context and framework, and has enough narrative pull to keep you turning pages. I look for drama, narrative, passion, as well as quirky side details. I also keep an eye out for things that I personally find funny or intriguing.
A&U: What do you think was the most significant obstacle faced by Charles Todd and his team, and how did they overcome it?
DD : The biggest obstacle was the harsh, unforgiving continent itself. In the north, they had to contend with the wet season, turning rivers into torrents, flooding the plains, and making everyone sick. Further south were deserts, and in the centre they were stymied by the MacDonnell Ranges, a mountain range of parallel east-west ridges. There were a few deaths. One man was eaten by a crocodile; another got lost and died of thirst south of Alice Springs (named after Charles’s wife Alice, by the way); others died of disease. But there were periods of near-calamity, when hundreds of workers could easily have perished, cut off from the outside world and from their own supply chains by rising floodwaters.
Another obstacle was time. Charles Todd was racing the clock to finish by the New Year’s Day, 1872 – a deadline that he did not meet – because of contractual arrangements with the corporation laying the submarine cable to Java.
A&U: Were there any specific letters or journal entries that offered surprising insights or shifted your perspective on the project?
DD: The more eye-witnesses you can find, the better the story, and, luckily, dozens of people involved wrote diaries and letters. I enjoyed reading the diaries of Charles Todd and the leader of the northern expedition, Robert Patterson. There was a lot of friction between the two men, so it was fun to read both of their points of view, and to then get the perspective of others on them as well.
A&U: Looking at the legacy of the Overland Telegraph, how did this project shape Australia’s future, and what parallels do you see with modern engineering challenges?
DD: The telegraph heralded the new, hi-tech age of communication. After it came telephone and radio and television and wifi and the internet. But it was the first of those technologies.
For Australia, the Overland Telegraph conquered the tyranny of distance. Before it, news arrived in bundles of newspapers on ships, and graziers exporting their wool had to guess at overseas prices with information that was months out of date. Before the telegraph, the only way of keeping in contact with faraway loved ones was by writing letters. But after the connection, news could arrive from London and other world capitals within a day. Deals were made, edicts issued. Telegraph brought the Australian colonies closer together, and maintained their social and political link to England. And it was the mechanism by which the continent’s heart was opened up to settlement, with profound and often tragic impact on remote indigenous communities.
What’s surprising in today’s context is the speed with which it was done. It was built in a two-year period, and the South Australian parliament released the funds only weeks before work commenced. Today, a project of that scale would not be completed in two years. It would probably not happen at all.
Charles Todd's Magnificent Obsession
by David Dufty
The construction of the Overland Telegraph in 1870 is an extraordinary feat of engineering and a wild gamble that nearly went terribly wrong.
Comments