Wool, Wires and Water: Technological Transitions at Strangways Springs

International Journal of Historical Archaeology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10761-025-00788-4 Wool, Wires and Water: Technological Transitions at Strangways Springs Genevieve Bell1 · Andrew Meares1 · Alistair Paterson2 · Isabel Richards1 Brendan Traw1 · Accepted: 24 February 2025 © The Author(s) 2025 Abstract The Strangways Springs artesian mound spring complex in South Australia reveals a layered history in which resources, technology, labor, and culture are significant and changing variables. The site exists in Arabana country, and for thousands of years provided a location for human shelter, artesian waters, and life sustaining resources. The arrival of sheep stations in the “Far North” of South Australia represented a significant rupture and the creation of a new kind of economy based on wool. The establishment of an overland telegraph repeater station brought the latest technological developments to this remote frontier, which had the information of the world available instantly. Other developments such as the railway and wool scouring further secured the importance of locations like Strangways Springs in the continent’s colonial infrastructure. This microhistory uses archaeology, archival research, and photography to explore these technological transitions and their impacts at Strangways Springs in the nineteenth century, providing important insights into the sociotechnical nexus that characterized emerging colonial worlds and new forms of modernity in settler Australia. Keywords Overland telegraph line · Technology · South Australian history · Cybernetics * Isabel Richards 1 School of Cybernetics, ANU, Canberra, Australia 2 UWA, Perth, Australia Vol.:(0123456789) International Journal of Historical Archaeology Introduction I travelled only seventeen miles this day, in various short tacks, but the general course was north-west, towards a remarkable-looking jumble of little hills. These I found to be a third batch of springs, exceeding the two first in number and extent of country it covered, but, on the whole, not so active, and differing from the former batches in rising partly out of a small patch of low scrub. Most of these springs had small limestone basins. Some of the water was very good, but much of it appeared strongly impregnated with calcareous matter. I have no doubt these springs would improve greatly with use. I drank the water in pretty large quantities, and found no ill effects from it. These are the "Strangways Springs" (after H. B. T. Strangways, Esq., M.P.), and the country around them is fit for pastoral purposes. (Warburton and Babbage 1858:14) Strangways Springs, or Pangki Warruna as it is known in Arabana, is a 7 km2 complex of artesian springs near Kati Thanda (Lake Eyre) in far north South Australia. Arabana ancestral figures – Kurkari (green snake) and Yurkungangku (red belly black snake) – gave the land its form, gave it its name, and gave the artesian springs their distinctive, mounded shape and color. Viewed from a satellite, it is a cluster of green and white circles against an ever-increasing backdrop of gibber plains and red sand dunes, more than 800 km from the nearest major metropolitan center of Adelaide. The first European accounts of Strangways Springs are those of Englishman Peter Edgerton Warburton, who recorded his impressions (quoted above) of the mound spring complex in October of 1858. Warburton and another surveyor – Benjamin Herschel Babbage, son of early computer pioneer Charles Babbage – were exploring the area north of the Flinders Rangers for potential settlement. Warburton’s focus on water indexes the desires of the growing population in Adelaide for new pastoral leases and new possibilities of wealth and territorial expansion (Gee 2000:7–12). Warburton’s report and other similar accounts helped push European settlement far into Arabana country, and with those settlers came sheep, cattle, horses, and very different kinds of cultural practices and technologies. The pastoral lease for Strangways Springs was taken in 1859 and for nearly 40 years thereafter, the artesian mound spring complex would be a vital node in many overlapping networks. The layers of infrastructure, which arrived in successive ways, created the possibility of innovation and the necessity for change. For a tiny settlement, Strangways Springs was remarkably connected to the wider world, and those connections shaped people, ideas, resources and even new technologies. It would be one of the northern most pastoral properties in South Australia, with runs of up to 20,000 sheep. Its wool clip would even make it all the way to London for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. It would serve as a repeater station on the Overland Telegraph Line from 1872 to 1896. It would be a railway stop on the Great Northern Railway from 1886 until at least 1896. It would be a ration depot for the Arabana as their access to their country and International Journal of Historical Archaeology cultural practices was increasingly restricted. Though distant from many significant centers, the various physical and electrical (or protodigital) links meant it was connected in new and novel ways. Strangways Springs saw rapid technological and social change in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Strangways Springs was intensely occupied from 1863 to 1896, after which it appears to have been abandoned, meaning the archaeological record is largely undisturbed and provides an opportunity to study nineteenth-century rural Australia. From archaeological examinations of colonial contact to ethnohistorical and cybernetic accounts of telegraphy, our interests intersect and collide at Strangways Springs (Bell 2023; Bell et al. 2023, 2024; Paterson 2008). Using a synthesis of archaeological evidence, historic images, and historic sources, we see Strangways Springs as a form of microhistory (Magnusson 2003) with the potential to reveal how different forms of networks are deployed at key nodes and more widely how technology and innovation characterize the colonial order. Theoretically, this movement in scale between the local (Strangways Springs) and forms of metanarrative accepts the challenge posed by Orser (2016) to explore the “metanarratives of modernity.” We are building on previous work at Strangways Springs which uses historical archaeology to reveal how Aboriginal Arabana people became differentially involved with the pastoral station and the resulting shifts from precontact lifeways (Paterson 2003, 2005), providing a detailed case study in culture contact research in Australia and globally (Paterson 2008). However, that work did not test how the Strangways Springs archaeological record could inform histories of technology and industry in colonial Australia. Our respective interests in archaeology, photography, cybernetics, anthropology, computing, and STS have involved interdisciplinary discussions forged through visiting sites related to the telegraph syste (...truncated)