The Singing Line - Tracking the Australian Adventures of My Intrepid Victorian Ancestors

Zusatztext "To return to a world in which news traveled less quickly! one only needs to read Alice Thomson's... The Singing Line ."-- The New York Times Book Review Informationen zum Autor Alice Thomson Klappentext Following the tradition of Daisy Bates in the Desert and In Patagonia, Alice Thomson conjures up a country of unimaginable strangeness and beauty. In 1855, Charles Todd and his impetuous young bride Alice--for whom Alice Springs would be named--left the comfort of Victorian England for the wilds of South Australia, a place so isolated that letters from home took five months to arrive. It was Charles's dream to improve this situtaion. In 1870, Todd set out with an army of men, supplies, and Afghan camels to run a telegraph line--"the singing line"--from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. Braving scorching sun, flies, mosquitoes, drenching rains, and all manner of terrible food, Alice Thomson and her husband retraced that trek more than a century later. The result is a wry and mesmerizing narrative--combining the delights of travel writing, family memoir, and colonial history in a thoroughly enjoyable tale.Alice lost her virginity Witness by The old man gum tree While the dog sat confused Patiently licking its wounds She gave birth To one stone room Next a shed then a house She then stepped one step south Before the caterpillars knew Alice grew With the scenery so strong The old man gum tree Witness Alice lose her virginity far before me --David Mpetyane, Aboriginal artist, 1992 The Proposal I could have been called Patience, Gwendoline, Kathleen or Maude, all family names. Instead, I was christened Alice after a solemn-looking great-great-grandmother who had black hair framing a round face, pale eyes and delicate hands. In every generation of my family someone had been named after this sepia woman, set in red velvet in our dining room. The original Alice, in her matronly Victorian crinolines, didn't look like an obvious role model. But she had one great redeeming feature; the story of her marriage proposal to a total stranger. In 1849, when she was only twelve years old, my great-great-grandmother was reputed to have done something few women nowadays would be brave enough to consider. One of eleven children of the Bell family in Cambridge, she was alone in the schoolroom one day and bored. Looking out of the window, she saw a man twice her age with a neat beard and narrow shoulders walk up to her black and white gabled house off the market place in Free School Lane. Running down to the kitchen, she was told that this skinny, pallid creature was a distant cousin who had come for 'white wine sherry' and Madeira cake with her mother. Intrigued by his forlorn face, Alice slipped into the drawing room and hid behind the chaise longue. There she listened as the awkward visitor explained that he had just been promoted to the job of assistant astronomer at the University Observatory. The young grocer's son, a Mr Charles Todd, had been given a letter of introduction to his wealthier merchant cousins by his patron, the seventh Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy. The formidable Mrs Bell politely inquired after the man's family, but with a depressive for a father and an invalid for a mother, Charles was unforthcoming. He and his two brothers and sisters had watched as the family's fortunes, in the form of a tea and groceries emporium in Islington, had dwindled into a four-barrel wine merchants in Greenwich. Charles would have followed his elder brother into the merchant navy on the first ship out if it hadn't been for Sir George Airy. The famous astronomer had plucked the fourteen-year-old out of the local Roan school in Greenwich. As a governor of the school, Sir George had heard about the young boy's extraordinary talent for mathematics. By seven, Charles u...

Product details

• Authors: Alice Thomson
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.10.2000
• EAN: 9780385497534
• ISBN: 978-0-385-49753-4
• No. of pages: 320
• Dimensions: 140 mm x 216 mm x 13 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Travel > Travel guides > Australia, New Zealand, Oceania