'Bush’ Telegraph Accuracy Puzzles

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 184, 6 August 1938, Page 11

'Bush’ Telegraph Accuracy Puzzles

PORT DARWIN—Using a skin stretched taut over a wooden frame, or the smoke of a forest lire, the primitive races in this part of the world can achieve the same results that Western man obtains with an army of workmen, a dozen highly involved processes, and several million dollars’ worth of machinery. Important messages art transmitted at high speed. What is more they have been doing this for a long time before there were any radios or Atlantic cables, and even to-day the manner in which news finds its way through the desolate Australian coastline is a mystery to white men. On several occasions this correspondent has come into contact with the 44 bush telegraph’* and seen its uncanny efficiency. A crime committed by natives in a lonely tract of Arnheim Land, at the headwaters of Snowdrop Creek, four weeks* journey from the nearest police post, was reported within eight hour* by a black tracker employed by the police, who brought news of it to a mounted policeman on patrol a few miles out from the post. At another time in the same territory a report of an accident reached a rescue party two days* journey away in six hours. Some investigators are not satisfied that drums and smoke signals are the full explanation of the way tho bush telegraph works. The minute detail in which messages are given is against this method. For what code, these investigators ask, could primitive peoples devise to transmit messages so fully in so short a time? Smoke signals might suffice for essentials and over desert country they will work over extraordinary distances, they know. Moreover, if smoke signals are mainly used and there is a primitive cods, how comes it that the messages are never delivered in garbled form after passing through constant relays of natives? These are questions anthropologists with many years of experience cannot satisfactorily answer. For a mechanistic explanation of the bush telegraph has to account for the fact that messages go through in misty days when the eye cannot see for great distances, and that jungle tribes, whose eyes are never used for anything mo r e than 50 yards away, are famously adept at sending messages over long distances. This, of course, is where the drums may be the explanation. On the Sepik River, in New Guinea, the writer has heard an almost continuous booming of native drums, recular, rhythmical, a