At 96 years old, Laurence Wallace is not as strong as the first day he walked into the cavernous Sydney Telegraph Office as World War II raged on — but his hands are just as lightning fast.
He is one of a handful of master telegraphists left in Australia skilled in the dying art of Morse code, still able to encode faster than most people can type.
Like it was yesterday, he remembers the bustling operations room filled with rows of people sending messages across the world and disseminating global news.
"You would have all these sounds going at the same time," he says.
"Telegrams were used more than telephones back then … it was much cheaper than a telephone call over a long distance."
Mr Wallace's love for the dot-dash code started the day he was plucked from a crowd of applicants and fast-tracked into the high-stakes job, and in the process was saved from fighting in the war.
So, today is a very important day for him.
It is the 150th anniversary of one of Australia's greatest logistical and engineering feats, which you would be forgiven for not knowing about.
On August 22, 1872, the mighty Overland Telegraph Line — covering the width of the continent — was connected, allowing fast communication between Australia and the rest of the world for the first time.
Breaking Australia's extreme isolation
It was the internet before the internet and it changed the country forever, built in a race against the clock and the harsh elements of the outback to connect Australia to the globe.
Before it, communication with the outside world was next to impossible for early settlers.
Ships carrying newspapers and letters to loved ones had a long journey across the sea.
"Whatever was happening in London, in the mother country, you didn't know about for two months or more," Darwin historian Jared Archibald says.
"[The Overland Telegraph Line meant] you could get it in hours. So something like the Queen dies, or there's a change of government or whatever … that stuff was coming through in hours."
Basically, it was revolutionary — and it started with one explorer's solo walk through some of Australia's harshest outback in 1862, after dozens of attempts.
"Within 10 years, one decade from one white man [John McDouall Stuart] doing that, we had a wire strung on 30,000-plus poles," Mr Archibald said.
"That allowed Australia to connect to a submarine cable, which came from Java, which then connected to telegraph lines and submarine cables all the way back to London."
The human drama of constructing the line
The trail from Adelaide to Darwin was well-known by Aboriginal people who had been travelling it as a trade route for thousands of years.
But when the South Australian government won the bid for the overseas link, a two-year mission began to build the telegraph line through uncharted wilderness in time for the undersea connection – as major fines were on the line if it was late.
There were already telegraph lines linking Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, but each state wanted the connection to London as it meant it would be the first to get global news.
"It was a huge logistical exercise to perform a massive engineering feat," Mr Archibald said.
It was rough and it was harsh, he said.
There were no townships, no roads, no trucks, no electricity, yet bushmen were tasked with stringing 3,200 kilometres of wire from Darwin to Adelaide and erecting 36,000 telegraph poles.
"They were at the mercy of whatever nature was going to throw," Mr Archibald said.
"Living off whatever you can carry on your horse in your pack saddles, so yeah, it would be a very rough diet [of] salt, beef, damper, some canned goods.
"There were men that died for all sorts of reasons … they would get gangrene, there was frontier violence as well."
One of the lesser-known facts about the feat is that the undersea cable broke in 1872.
Also, Darwin had been linked to London for some time before the final points of the line were finally connected.
And the line's final connection happened at Frew Ponds, near Dunmarra, 640 kilometres south of Darwin in the Northern Territory, where more than 100 people are gathering for the anniversary today.
'Our numbers have diminished'
While the Overland Telegraph Line broke Australia's extreme isolation and laid the groundwork for the communications revolution we have today, our dependence on the message service faded after World War II due to increasing usage of the telephone.
But Mr Wallace says we should not forget about it too soon.
"Everybody has speed communication at their fingertips … but what if these modern communication systems, something happened of a calamity and they disappeared?" he said.
Mr Wallace said most people in Australia still able to decipher Morse code were ageing fast and the skills were not being passed on.
"Our numbers have diminished. I've got about four people that are skilled enough to send Morse code," he said, adding that overseas the penny had dropped on the importance of preserving the communication code.
"In America, they're training about 1,000 telegraphers in the armed services each year. It would be great to see that in Australia."
