The importance of the telegraph to the colonies cannot be overrated, and the anxiety it created can only be understood by those who have watched the avidity with which news from England is received in all her dependencies. Australia had hitherto been dependent on one arrival monthly from England,--and on a very little credited monthly dispatch reaching her shores via New York, San Francisco, and New Zealand. The English monthly mail touches first at King George’s Sound, in Western Australia, but thence there are no wires into the other colonies. The mail steamer then passes on to Melbourne, while a branch boat takes the mails to Adelaide. As the distance to Adelaide is considerably shorter than to Melbourne, the English news generally reaches that port first, and is thence disseminated to the other colonies. That happens once a month. Then comes, also once a month, the so-called Californian telegrams, not unfrequently giving a somewhat distorted view of English affairs. This is now changed for daily news. We who have daily news,--as do all of us in England every morning at our breakfast-table,--are sometimes apt to regard it as a bore, and tell ourselves that it would be delightful to have a real budget on an occasion after a month of silence. The only way to learn the value of the thing, is to be without it for a time. In the single item of the price of wool in the London market, the Australian telegraph will be of inestimable value to the colonies. When the scheme was first brought forward there was a question whether the line through the Australian continent should be made by the joint efforts of the colonies or by the energy of one. South Australia is justly proud of herself, in that she undertook the work, and has accomplished it. The telegraph line has certainly been the means of introducing the northern territory into general notice; and now a much larger project has been formed,--which, if it be carried out, will certainly create a new colony on the northern coast. The proposition is to make a railway along the telegraph line, a railway from Adelaide right across Australia, over the huge desert of the continent, to Port Darwin! Who will travel by it? What will it carry? Whence will the money come? How will it be made to pay? And as it cannot possibly be made to pay,--as far as human sight can see,--what insane philanthropists or speculators will be found able to subscribe the enormous sum of money necessary for such a purpose? These are of course the questions that are asked. The distance to be covered by the new line is very nearly 1,800 miles, and the money said to be necessary for it is £10,000,000! There are no inhabitants in the country,--at any rate none who would use a railway, and at the distant terminus there is no town,--not as yet a community of 200 white inhabitants.