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2022 Issue 18 - 150 Years Overland Telegraph with RAM $1 PNC
Postal Numismatic Cover is limited to 7,500
On 22 August 1872, the Overland Telegraph line between Adelaide and Darwin was finally connected. It was the result of years of planning and 23 months of arduous construction through the arid centre of the continent and the wet,mosquito-infested terrain of the Top End. The telegraph involved 36,000 poles being erected across 2,839 kilometres, from Port Augusta in the south to Darwin in the north, throughterritory virtually unexplored by Europeans. Charles Todd, South Australia’s Superintendent of Telegraphs and the Postmaster-General, was the visionary responsible for bringing the project to realisation, accomplished within a mere two years of the first pole being planted. This huge logistical achievement has been called the greatest engineering feat of 19th-century Australia. It dramatically transformed the speed and breadth of communications in the country, and, within two months of opening, with the rest of the world via an undersea cable from Darwin to Jarva.