Description
“As Thomson recounts the trials and tribulation of this bunch of Victorian dreamers, ravaged alternately be sun, floods, snakes, malaria and crocodiles, she also vividly describes her own various setbacks…I was not only imaginatively caught up in the evocation of the outback, its raw beauty and emptiness, but completely entranced by the dynamics of a relationship’ Mail on Sunday
In 1855 an impoverished young scientist from Greenwich told his guardian that he was off to chance his luck in Australia – as Government Astronomer and Superintendent of Telegraphs for the small colony of South Australia. With him went his young wife Alice – after whom Alice Springs would be named. For Charles Todd was following a dream – the near impossible task of stringing a telegraph wire across one of the last uncrossed colonial wilderness, and finally connecting Australia with Britain.
In 1997, their great-great-granddaughter, Alice, followed in their footsteps. Her plan was to track the telegraph and her ancestors, from Adelaide over the thousands of miles of desert, outback, swamp and mountain that Charles Todd had crossed in the 1860s with his 400 men.
‘They were pioneers…in Alice Thomson they have the spirited chronicle they deserve’ Daily Telegraph
Soft cover, 292 pages. In very good to excellent preloved condition.