维州精英中学考试阅读例题

The Last Crossing

The Last Crossing

On the morning the ferry made its final run, Ruby arrived at the landing before her uncle did. The river was the colour of strong tea, and mist sat on it so thickly that the far bank was only a rumour. Behind her, on the rise above the town, the new bridge stood finished and silent, its white railings strung with bunting that no one had yet bothered to straighten.

Uncle Dev came down the track at seven, carrying the brass bell he had polished every Sunday for thirty-one years. He did not mention the bridge. He hung the bell on its hook, checked the cable, and said, as he always did, 'Right. Let's see if she remembers the way.'

Ruby had heard him say it a hundred times and had always laughed. This morning the words seemed to need something from her, so she said, 'She'll remember,' and was surprised by how steady her own voice was.

There were more passengers than usual: Mrs Okafor with her grandson, two men from the council in pressed shirts, and a woman with a camera who kept asking Uncle Dev to stand a little to the left. He stood a little to the left. He answered her questions politely and briefly, the way he answered tourists who asked whether the fish were biting.

Halfway across, the mist began to lift. Ruby watched the far bank sharpen into gums and fence posts and the roof of the old pump shed. She had crossed this water twice a day for every school term she could remember, and she realised she had never once looked at it properly; it had simply been the thing between home and everywhere else.

When the ferry nudged the landing, Uncle Dev rang the bell three times instead of once. Nobody asked why. The council men shook his hand. The woman with the camera lowered it, and for a moment she did not raise it again.

A Wire Across the Continent

A Wire Across the Continent

In the 1860s, news from Britain reached the Australian colonies by ship, and it was always old. A report of an election or a change in prices in London might take six weeks or more to arrive, by which time events had moved on. Merchants guessed, governments waited, and families learnt of births and deaths long after they had happened.

The telegraph offered a cure. A message tapped out as electrical pulses could travel along a wire almost instantly, and by 1870 an undersea cable was planned to link Java with the northern coast of Australia. The question was how to carry the signal from there to the cities of the south, across more than 3,000 kilometres of country that few colonists had crossed.

South Australia's Superintendent of Telegraphs, Charles Todd, argued that his colony should build the line, and in 1870 work began from both ends. The planners had underestimated almost everything. Wet-season floods in the north washed away tracks and spoilt supplies; in the dry centre, teams hauled water as well as wire. Wooden poles were attacked by termites, and many were later replaced with iron ones. A signal also weakened over long distances, so repeater stations had to be built along the route, each one staffed by operators who lived for months at a time far from any town.

In August 1872 the last gap in the line was closed, and soon a message could travel from Adelaide to London within a day rather than weeks. The change was hard to overstate. Australian traders could now follow wool and wheat prices in Britain from one day to the next; newspapers printed overseas news while it was still news.

Yet the line's greatest effect may have been one that its builders did not set out to achieve. Before 1872, each colony had kept its face turned towards London more than towards its neighbours. A single wire strung through the heart of the continent, with operators listening at lonely stations all along it, made the continent itself feel, perhaps for the first time, like one place.