The Singing Line: Tracking the Adventure of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors - Hardcover

Thomson, Alice

3.8

5 ratings by Goodreads

9780385490597: The Singing Line: Tracking the Adventure of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385490593 ISBN 13: 9780385490597

Publisher: Doubleday, 1999

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A charming true-life romantic adventure about a pair of young British couples--one hundred fifty years apart--braving the exotic rigors of the Australian Outback

The Singing Line is a wondrous narrative that combines the historical adventure of Longitude or Endurance with the keen insights and rambling rhythms of Under the Tuscan Sun and A Year in Provence.

One hundred sixty years ago, Charles Todd, an impecunious astronomer's assistant, was sitting in his prosperous relatives' drawing room in Oxford, England, telling them of his dreams. He wished to go to South Australia and seek his fortune in the wild colony as Government Astronomer and Superintendent of Telegraphs. What he did not mention was that he also intended to string a telegraph wire--"the singing line"--across the brutal Australian Outback, which no human had ever even crossed before. Charles despaired of only one thing: finding a wife willing to brave such hardship with him. Suddenly, twelve-year-old Alice, hiding beneath the chaise longue, piped up: "I will marry you, Mr. Todd, if no one else will." And seven years later, so she did.

Alice Thomson, a young, successful British journalist, decided to trace the paths taken by Charles and Alice Todd, her great-great-grandparents. These two intrepid souls had left the comforts of Victorian England to settle in South Australia, the most remote part of the British Empire in the 1840s. Charles's quest to connect the desolate continent with the rest of the world by stringing telegraph wire from south to north was an almost unimaginably difficult feat. Even today the journey is something of an ordeal, as Alice Thomson and her bemused and long-suffering husband, Edward, learned.

Thomson spins the fascinating tale of the Todds' adventures Down Under with wit and grace. Charles did in fact succeed in laying his "singing line" across the Outback, an astonishing feat requiring the peculiarly Victorian virtue of pluck. Alice, from a comfortable home, suddenly had to adapt to the life of a frontier wife in the oddest and most isolated place imaginable. Charles's implacable derring-do--his many expeditions and near-disasters--and Alice's equally brave attempts to re-create a proper British life in a land of dust, flies, kangaroos, and emus make for a tale equal parts charm and excitement.

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Review:

The Singing Line was the term given by Australia's Aborigines to the telegraph wire that, once slung across the continent, would open the world and permanently alter their lives. Writer Alice Thomson and her husband Ed follow the trail of the singing line while tracing the path of her great-great-grandparents, Charles and Alice Todd, the latter for whom Thomson was named. Flipping from the present to the mid-18th century in which her ancestors lived, this book offers both a glimpse of the heroic efforts of telegraph surveyors and the changes that these poles and wires wrought.

The tales of Alice Todd are sparse and of little consequence, however, since after arriving from England, the young bride never strays 30 miles from her home in Adelaide. It's her husband, Charles, who propels much of the book, as he oversaw the construction of the Australian telegraph in the 1850s, traveling--sometimes on camel--across desert, bush, and a no-man's-land where white men had never been, battling man-eating alligators, quicksand, monsoons, near-starvation, dehydration, and searing heat along the way.

At its best, The Singing Line is lively, funny, and filled with odd narrative snapshots of Aussies and their land. Like the stringing of the telegraph wire itself, though, this book can become a bit monotonous and fail to fully engage the reader. Ultimately, however, it does succeed in its task--and leaves one with an appreciation of struggles oft-forgotten in the age of modems and cellular phones. --Melissa Rossi

About the Author:

Alice Thomson is associate editor, columnist, and interviewer for the Daily Telegraph. Born in 1967, she is also restaurant critic for The Spectator. She was named Alice after her great-great-grandmother Alice Todd, for whom Alice Springs, Australia, is also named.

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