The Singing Line

In 1855 an impoverished young English scientist went 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. Charles Todd was following a dream - the near impossible task of stringing a telegraph wire across the wilderness of the Australian outback. In 1997, Charles Todd's great-great-great-granddaughter, Alice, followed in his 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 four hundred men.