
I bought The Singing Line in 2012, following a recommendation by an Australian friend. So I have just read it, 9 years later.
Alice Thomson is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Todd and his young wife Alice. In the 1850s the newly wed Charles and Alice left England for the colony of South Australia. Charles Todd led the ambitious project of constructing a telegraph line from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north, where it could be connected to a cable that would complete a link between Australia and the rest of the Empire. Messages between Australia and London that had taken months to reach their destination would take a few hours.
The continent had only been crossed once before from north to south. There were deserts, mountains, swamps to traverse. There was no known route across the mountain ranges in the middle. And yet Todd did it. He named the town of Alice Springs after his wife.
Some 125 years later his great-great-granddaughter and her husband followed the route of the telegraph across Australia. This book tells the story of that 1997 journey, of Charles Todd and his construction of the telegraph line, and of Alice. Ultimately it is a very human story, well told.
9 out of 10.