In this information age with satellite communications and the Internet, rapid international telecommunications are now taken for granted. Before the telephone arrived, however, long distance communication relied on the telegraph whereby signals were transmitted by Morse code along overhead wires. In countries such as Australia, the distances were significant and the terrain extremely challenging.
In the 1860s, work began to connect Australia, via undersea cable, to the then Dutch East Indies, and thus to the rest of the world, and construction was started on the original Moreton section of the Far North Queensland Morse code telegraph line.

The northern section of the telegraph ran through very difficult country, so rugged that mail still had to be delivered by pack horse until after the end of World War 2 and the telegraph survey expedition was only the fourth overland expedition ever made to Cape York. It took two months and cost the lives of numerous pack horses.
Construction work on this northern section was completed in 1886 except for 90 km between Moreton and Mein which had to be linked by pony express until the line was completed. 650 km long, the telegraph line ran from a settlement now known as Fairview, to Thursday Island. The line consisted of galvanized iron 'Oppenheimer' poles, which were manufactured in Germany from cast iron and then galvanized. Each pole supported a single wire mounted at its apex.

In 1885 tenders had been accepted for the construction of the southern sections of the link, from Charter Towers to Fairview, which comprised two 340 km long single-wire lines using 400 pound- to-the-mile galvanized wire, also mounted on galvanized iron Oppenheimer poles.
Pioneer Frank Jardine, after whom Australia's most northerly river is named, was given the job of arranging delivery of materials to work gangs along the line, which was itself a difficult task. During the wet summer season of 1886-87, only 35 km of line were built and 200 km of clearing completed to the last station at Mein. The undersea cable section from Cape York to Thursday Island, a distance of 12 km was completed in November 1886.
The line was completed and served Australia well for almost 60 years until the outbreak of war when better communications were required in the face of the threat to the northern coastline. In only four months during 1942, 1200 US Army Signal Corps members and 70 Australian Post Master General staff added cross-arms and an additional eight lines to the existing poles.

After more than 100 years of service, the line was closed in 1987. Tenders were called initially for removal of the wire, and later for removal of the poles and cross arms. But the government of the day was too late! Today, countless four-wheel drive vehicles travel the north in search of souvenirs that are in high demand. Insulators, wires and even poles have been removed, many for use in stockyards, gates and sheds, a testimony to the durability of the galvanized poles, which were put into reuse without further coating, by this time 110 years old.

In July 1993, Cairns galvanizer Ron Pollard followed the route of the original telegraph to Cape York. Ron tested several of the old poles for galvanized coating thickness and found that, even after 110 years exposure, the remaining poles retained extremely heavy coating thicknesses.

A Dutch galvanizing expert, Jan van Eijnsbergen, travelling in central Australia in 1981, came across some fully intact galvanized Oppenheimer poles within the old overland station near Alice Springs, now a national park. These were part of the telegraph line built between 1870 and 1872 from Adelaide to Alice Springs and Darwin, a total distance of over 3000 km.
Van Eijnsbergen reported that "this line had been completed under the direction of Sir Charles Todd, a gigantic enterprise finished within two years." The original 36,000 poles were a mixture of timber and galvanized Oppenheimer poles, but many of the timber poles were rapidly destroyed by white ants and in 1873, 6000 new Oppenheimer poles replaced them.
In May 1995, Gary Wright, a businessman from Bamaga, Cape York, organized the removal and transport of four poles to Cairns for restoration. They have now been returned to Bamaga where they have been installed as a memorial to the Moreton Telegraph Line pioneers and their extraordinary achievements in some of the world's most inhospitable terrain. The Line is a fitting tribute to the remarkable durability of galvanized steel and to zinc's powerful anti-corrosion properties.