A rather restless night last night. Apart from the usual night terrors that accompany one on holiday, like how am I doing to pay the MasterCard bill, did I put the cat out, is the tap still running and do I really need to get up for a whizz,…….it rained and rained and rained. The fear then became are we going to be able to drag this holiday carnival out of it’s red-mud quagmire and back onto the bitumen.

Then the sun came up and all was well.

We are travelling south on the Stuart Highway named for the man who plotted the route way back in eighteen sixty. It took John McDougal Stuart two years to travel the three thousand kilometres. I have a mental image of “The McDougal Stuart” striding the plains in full Scottish regalia. Kilt, bagpipes, sporran swinging in the mid day sun, his red complexion no doubt giving a modern day dermatologist his very own version of the night terrors.

A capable driver can now complete Mr. Stuart’s two-year trek in two days thanks to the Northern Territory’s “open speed zones”. The open speed zones mean that you can drive as fast as you like, at your peril naturally.

The “Cannonball Run” race was once held in the Northern Territory, no doubt due to the liberal speed limit. There is a memorial to a couple of participants that on the race results were listed as DNF (did not finish).

Where was I ….Oh Testra. Back in the eighteen seventies, the Australian government commissioned the overland telegraph line. This was to link Adelaide in the south, to Darwin in the north along Stuart’s route.

The statistics for the line are quite staggering. Eleven telegraph stations, three thousand kilometres of wire across very inhospitable countryside, thirty six thousand telegraph poles at a cost of four hundred and seventy thousand pounds. The cost of sending a ten-word telegram was one pound ($2). This allowing for inflation would now be $50 for your ten words.

The last time we travelled away we returned to a $10,600 (that’s right ten thousand six hundred dollar) mobile phone bill. After much argument Telstra agreed that it may have been a slight overcharge and refunded about ninety nine percent of it, much to their credit (ha ha….credit , get it). Anyway, now I at least know what scale of rates they were using.

Sunrise at Tennant Creek

Telstra’s head office 1870,s

Sunrise at Tennant Creek