THE OVERLAND
TELEGRAPH LINE

When the Overland Telegraph Line was completed on 22 August 1872, it activated a communication wire across the Australian continent, from Adelaide to Port Darwin, that connected the Australian colonies to each other, to the rest of the British Empire and to the world. Understandably, it is often described as the greatest feat of engineering in colonial Australia. Overseen by Superintendent of Telegraphs Charles Todd, the Overland Telegraph Line was built in three sections – southern, central and northern - between 1870 and 1872.

It did not create the first line of communication through the continent’s interior: Aboriginal pathways of communication, trade and exchange had criss-crossed the continent for millennia. But it did facilitate a European overland route of access across the country that became a catalyst for further colonisation, cross-cultural encounter and the formation of new kinds of relationships.

In October 1872, the Adelaide Telegraph Office received the first message of the newly opened Overland Telegraph Line. This was the culmination of some two and a half years of construction which involved an immense commitment of resources and labour. The Overland Telegraph Line’s construction is often remembered for its technical difficulties and technological achievement, but the line also brought social, cultural and environmental upheaval for the many Aboriginal groups whose lands it passed through. Charles Todd’s instructions to overseers in charge of works stressed that the construction parties should avoid contact with Aboriginal people. But contact inevitably occurred and on both sides it produced a mix of curiosity, concern and conflict. 

The contract for the Southern Section of the Overland Telegraph Line was awarded to Edward Bagot, a stock and station agent, who had a direct interest in locating pastoral land in Central Australia. The contract entailed erecting and wiring about twenty telegraph poles each mile, for 500 miles (800 kilometres), from Strangways Springs to the Peake (both of which operated as both pastoral stations and repeater stations), across Arabana and Arrernte country.

The system of contracting out work for the Line’s three sections generated occasional protest, partly in recognition of the risks posed by passing through country without establishing good relations with the Aboriginal owners. In July 1870, for example, a correspondent wrote to the Adelaide Express and Telegraph demanding that the government rather than private contractors undertake the work: ‘A body of men are to be sent into an unknown country, under the tender care of contractors, whose only aim will be to make as much profit out of the thing as possible ….this work is one of friendly relations with the natives, through which the line will pass, or one of unending enmity’(6 July 1870). But while the government did take management of the Central Section, the Southern Section was left to Bagot, who afterwards took up the lease of Undoolya station on Central Arrernte country and became one of the most active land-holders and speculators in northern South Australia.  

The journals kept by the men of the Telegraph Line construction parties often recorded an impression of setting foot in untrodden lands, and relayed their first encounters with Aboriginal people from that perspective.

But observing the Line’s construction parties from their own country, Aboriginal people would have been alert to the intruders’ approach. As historian Henry Reynolds writes, they were likely already ‘armed with knowledge and expectations’ about these incomers from neighbouring groups, and ready to respond with caution, curiosity or defiance.

The first repeater station north of Port Augusta was established on the lands of Kuyani people, close neighbours to Adnyamathanha people to the east. Its chosen site was the Beltana pastoral station, acquired by the pastoralist and politician Thomas Elder in 1862. Well before the construction of the Overland Telegraph Line, pastoral possession of precious water and land resources, combined with drought, placed enormous pressure on Kuyani and Andyamathanha people. In 1867 the Sub-Protector of Aborigines for the Far North, John Parker Buttfield, reported on sickness and hunger among Aboriginal people caused by the ‘almost total absence of native animals, and the failure of other resources’. The Overland Telegraph Line added to these pressures by opening a path for further pastoral expansion.

In the mid-1860s, Beltana became the first station to use camels for the transport of pastoral supplies when Thomas Elder and fellow pastoralist Samuel Stuckey imported a herd of camels and a team of cameleers from what is now Pakistan. Commonly referred to as ‘ships of the desert’, camels proved very effective for the transportation of goods and supplies in the dry interior. When the Overland Telegraph Line was erected in the early 1870s, camels and ‘Afghan’ cameleers were employed to carry the necessary supplies to the inland construction camps.  

Typically referred to simply as ‘Afghans’, cameleers came not only from what is now Afghanistan but from various provinces of what was then part of the north-western British Indian Empire. Usually employed on indenture contracts of two or three years, their labour was sought because of their specialised skills in inland cartage work that Europeans were ill-equipped to perform. Also unlike European workers, cameleers’ indenture contracts included a minimum monthly wage supplemented with rations. The cameleers were in demand for their unique skill set, and there is evidence that their work was valued. Predominantly Muslim, they were also frequently subject to European suspicion and discrimination.  

Many of the cameleers contracted from what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan and northwest India returned to their homelands when their indenture contracts expired. But others remained, married Aboriginal or European wives, and built permanent livelihoods in the townships that developed around the telegraph stations and railheads. The cameleers established Australia’s first mosques and the foundations of Australia’s early Muslim communities. 

Repeater and pastoral stations along the Overland Telegraph Line became the departure point for other overland expeditions east and west of the line. While exploration expeditions are typically known by the names of their European leaders, their success depended upon the skills and knowledge of Aboriginal guides and Afghan cameleers. Alfred Gile's 1875 expedition across the Great Victoria Desert followed two earlier attempts to cross the western desert. It left from the Beltana pastoral and telegraph station supported by camels supplied by Thomas Elder. The party included two Aboriginal guides, including the young Wirangu man Tommy Oldham, and the Afghan cameleer Mahomet Saleh, who was already an experienced expeditioner.

Cameleer labour was indispensable to the construction of both the Overland Telegraph Line and the transcontinental railway line, which began construction in 1878, following the Overland Telegraph Line’s route. In 1883, the Afghan brothers Faiz and Tagh Mahomet established their own successful camel cartage company at the new railhead township of Maree (formerly Hergott Springs), halfway between the Beltana and Strangways Springs Telegraph Stations in Kuyani country. As well as servicing most of the new supply routes through Central Australia, the Mahomet brothers held a contract with the Superintendent of Telegraphs, Charles Todd, to deliver telegraph stores and equipment to the Telegraph Line stations. 

Maree (Hergott Springs), the railhead town between Beltana and Strangways Springs Telegraph Stations, developed as a vibrant transcultural town. Today descendants of the Muslim cameleers still hold an important place in the trans-cultural heritage of Indigenous Australia. 

The Strangways Springs Telegraph Station was established in Arabana country and, like Beltana, at the site of an existing pastoral station. Like their neighbours to the south, Arabana people had endured the combined impacts of pastoralism and drought by 1871 when the Overland Telegraph Line came through. By this time, the South Australian colonial government had established a network of rations depots through the colony’s northern districts (and elsewhere) to alleviate the impacts of colonisation and drought on Aboriginal communities. Providing quarterly issues of flour, sugar, tea and other minimum necessities, rations depots in the north were usually located at police stations, pastoral stations and telegraph repeater stations. Like other pastoral and repeater stations in the north, the Strangways Springs station played a complex role as a site of colonial dispossession, a rations depot and an Aboriginal gathering place.

The pastoral industry was hit with a major labour shortage during the 1850s as European workers disappeared to the Victorian goldfields, and Aboriginal men and women began replacing European workers as shearers, wool-sorters, stockmen and women, boundary riders, fence-builders and domestic workers. Pastoral employers usually paid their Aboriginal workforce not in wages but in the government-supplied rations that were commonly distributed from pastoral, telegraph and police stations. This marked a shift from an aggressive phase of Aboriginal dispossession to an unwaged labour relationship.  

Aboriginal people’s experience in the pastoral industry varied widely, but their essential contribution to the pastoral industry meant many people remained on their countries. The Australian historian Ann McGrath describes the relationship between pastoralists and Aboriginal workers as a kind of symbiosis. Even as the labour relationship continued an ‘unjust social order’, she writes, pastoralists were ‘aware that that in many ways the country remained Aboriginal’. In 1899, John Hogarth at Strangways Springs was one of numerous pastoralists who testified to a government Select Committee on the vital role of Aboriginal people in the pastoral industry.

Thomas Frederick Smith worked on the southern and central sections of the Overland Telegraph Line and his diary records sightings of Aboriginal groups from a distance and occasional brief encounters. As his party passed through Arrernte country, in sight of the MacDonnell Ranges, Smith noted that Aboriginal people were ‘very numerous’. Sometimes Arrernte parties followed the incomers but ‘don’t show themselves’ (11 January 1871). At other times they ‘waved to us to clear out’ (12 April 1871). On the whole, he thought, they didn’t welcome the presence of the Europeans but showed diplomatic forbearance towards them. Other construction parties reported that Aboriginal people ‘shake their spears in token of defiance’ (10 June 1871).  

In April 1871, heavy rainfall flooded watercourses in Arrernte country, washing away wire from the Overland Telegraph and stalling work at what would become the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. The South Australian Register reported on 18 April 1872 that at Alice Springs ‘the grass has grown in abundance’, but Aboriginal people ‘keep out of sight’. No doubt, though, they observed the Europeans’ activity. The Alice Springs station layout was typical of the main repeater stations. The complex comprised the station-masters quarters, an office, men's hut, harness-room, transport store, blacksmith's shop and cart-shed, together with stockyard and well. The buildings have survived intact until the present day. The Arrernte camped close to the station, establishing a semi-permanent camp there from the 1870s until the 1920s.

During his 1875 journey to his first introductory posting to the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, the young telegraphist Francis Gillen recorded two vocabularies from Aboriginal people, at the Peake station and at Charlotte Waters. Together, these comprise the first written records of Arabana, Wangkangurru and Lower Arrernte. Gillen would later work closely with Arrernte men and women at Alice Springs.

Superintendent of Telegraphs Charles Todd shared the dominant Victorian view of relentless British expansion, inevitably expanding and sweeping across indigenous landscapes, and there is no doubt that he gave little thought to the effects on Aboriginal people of his technological installation penetrating and crossing their countries. It is worth noting then, that Todd thought it important to gather a vocabulary of Arabana words at the Peake telegraph station.

The Telegraph Line as an exploration base

The Overland Telegraph Line served as a dividing line between ‘explored’ and ‘unexplored’ Australia. To the east the inland interior was becoming known to Europeans, but to the west lay the forbidding western deserts. With its well-supplied repeater stations, the Telegraph Line took on a new role as a base for exploration during the 1870s. Successful or not, those explorations brought a series of Aboriginal desert cultures into contact with Europeans.

By the late 1870s Europeans had learnt that the country to the west of the Line was unsuitable for pastoralism. It would be another sixty years or so before the western desert groups such as the Ngadadjara, Pitjantjatjara, Pintubi and Warlpiri began leaving their ancient desert homelands for European settlements and missions.

During the 1870s several exploring expeditions attempted to cross the western deserts, either from the Telegraph Line or towards it, including Major Peter Egerton Warburton. Travelling by camel with Afghan cameleers, his party eventually reached the west coast, but were forced well northwards of their initial objective and almost perished in the attempt. As they struggled to reach the Western Australia coast the party survived only by eating their camels, and through the bush skills of their Aboriginal tracker, recorded only as ‘Charley’.

The explorer John Forrest became the first European to find a route westward from Perth to the Line. The party included two Aboriginal trackers, Kungaitch (Tommy Windich) and Beearragurl (Tommy Pierre). The expedition spent two weeks at the remote desert site of Weld Springs (Palatji), provoking an armed attack by the traditional owners, the Martu people. After six months in the field, Forrest’s party reached the Telegraph Line north of Peake Station on 27 September 1874.

Other explorers relied on the Overland Telegraph Line as well as upon Aboriginal trackers and their bush-craft. William Gosse departed from Alice Springs in April 1873, in direct competition with Warburton’s expedition, but aside from being the first European to see Uluru (naming it Ayers Rock, after the South Australian premier), he was soon forced to retreat to the safety of the Telegraph Line. Gosse drew this sketch of Uluru, reached on 19 July 1873. He wrote in his journal: ‘in its side are large caves, which when viewed from a short distance cause it to present a most remarkable appearance’. (Gosse 1874) It would take another six or seven decades before anthropologists working with Anangu people began to understand the sacred significance of these features, and of the paintings contained in the caves and overhangs of the Rock.

Using the Line: Scientists and Politicians 

South Australia took administrative control of the Northern Territory in 1863, assuming that its natural resources could be exploited more effectively once telegraphic communications were established. The Territory was not so easily administered though, and South Australian politicians argued over its economic advantages and disadvantages. In 1891 the South Australian Governor, Lord Kintore, proposed an expedition along the Telegraph Line from Darwin to Adelaide to assess the Territory’s future. Accompanying him was Edward Stirling, director of the South Australian Institute Museum, and police trooper Thomas Cornock. At the telegraph stations Stirling and Cornock were able to barter with visiting Aboriginal men and women for artefacts and natural history specimens.

The Horn Scientific Expedition, 1894

In 1894 a small group of scientists undertook an intensive survey of the MacDonnell Ranges, in Arrernte country. Zoology, anthropology, geology, entomology and ornithology were explored by specialists from Australian museums and universities, travelling through the Ranges by camel. The party based itself at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station, where Francis Gillen and his staff became drawn into the scientific project. By the expedition’s end, Gillen and Baldwin Spencer had become close colleagues. Their collaboration with the Arrernte led to a vastly improved understanding of Aboriginal religion and social structure, the basis for western knowledge of the Dreaming.

Economy of Exchange along the Line

Barter was a key protocol within Aboriginal societies and often marked their frontier dealings with Europeans. The exchange of goods fostered relationships and provided an expectation of reciprocity into the future. The telegraph stations became a source for a range of commodities desired by Aboriginal people, ranging from cloth and metal to tobacco, flour and tea. In exchange, Aboriginal people offered social bonds, and artefacts – boomerangs and other weapons and articles of dress or decoration. Artefact manufacture was a constant process, and these objects were readily replaced; many were even made solely for the exchange. A number of these artefacts are preserved in museums, while little trace remains of the European commodities. 

These exchanges seem to have occurred most often in the Central Section of the Overland Telegraph Line where telegraphists such as Gillen, Paddo Byrne at Charlotte Waters, James Field at Tennant Creek or Frank Scott at Barrow Creek collected language vocabularies, engaged Aboriginal women and children to collect particular zoological specimens, documented ethnographic collections with names supplied by Aboriginal people, and supplied specimens to southern museums which now constitute a record of species now rare or extinct in Central Australia.

Another impetus to the trade in objects at the telegraph stations was a letter sent to all the stations along the Overland Telegraph Line by Edward Stirling, Director of the South Australian Museum in 1890. The letter was a call to assemble a record of the culture being gradually extinguished in many parts of the country, helping to activate a network of collectors along the Overland Telegraph Line, so that for the next three decades at least, Aboriginal people actively traded their artefacts for European commodities. The telegraph stations took on a role as distribution centres for rations, and as places where Aboriginal people became increasingly familiar with European ways, the English language, and a range of new commodities. This complex system of reciprocity was extended to the telegraph station staff themselves.

At Alice Springs Telegraph Station, Francis Gillen worked for ten remarkable years in an oddly balanced partnership with Arrernte people. A few months after his arrival he placed the region's senior police officer, Mounted Constable William Willshire, under arrest for murdering two Aboriginal men. Willshire had based his police camp at a waterhole of great ceremonial and economic significance to Arrernte people, known to them as Alitera, located a little east of the Telegraph Line’s route between Charlotte Waters and Alice Springs. For Willshire this was a strategic site for undertaking punitive policing patrols in service to pastoral interests, and for Arrernte Willshire’s name became associated with violent encounters. The anthropologist John Mulvaney also notes that by establishing his police camp at a site of such importance to Arrernte cultural and economic life, Willshire closed off traditional access ‘to its resources and to the route along the Finke gorge’.  After Willshire’s arrest, Gillen's standing rose among the Arrernte, who agreed that he and his colleague, W.B. Spencer of the National Museum of Victoria, could witness and document their secret ceremonies. The resulting archive of images and text has become a crucial resource for contemporary Aboriginal people in Central Australia. By the turn of the twentieth century Arrernte ideas, objects, words and images began circulating through metropolitan society in the Australian capitals. Those Arrernte objects also included important natural history specimens and collections of lizards and frogs, insects and mammals.

Aboriginal people bartered many objects to Overland Telegraph workers, particularly during the 1890s, when a network of telegraph station staff were gathering collections on behalf of museums. Some bear the marks of long use; others seem quite freshly made, traded for European commodities. Metal and tobacco were highly desired commodities during this period, worth risking direct contact with Overland Telegraph Line parties or with the repeater stations themselves. Artefacts were readily replaced, particularly as stone became replaced by metal.

Port Darwin, in Larrakia country, was a fledging colonial port when the first pole of the Overland was planted there in September 1870. But although it formed a new port of trade and transport for Europeans, the area around Port Darwin was central to centuries-old Larrakia trade with Wagait and Wulna neighbours as well as with people further abroad, particularly the Macassan fishing fleets during their annual voyages to the northern coast to gather trepang (sea-cucumber). These visits had always entailed trade, and often conflict, giving Arnhem Landers confidence in their dealings with these new, European strangers.

A sketch of planting the first pole for the Overland Telegraph Line northern section at Port Darwin for the illustrated press depicts a respectably dressed collection of European settlers gathered to mark the event. Larrakia people are not visible in the picture but they were present. James Stapleton, who would be fatally speared less than four years later in the attack on Barrow Creek Telegraph Station, observed Aboriginal people's reactions to the gun salute that accompanied the erection of the first Overland Telegraph Line pole, noting that it alarmed them. 

Paul Foelsche arrived at Port Darwin in 1869, heading the police contingent accompanying the Goyder Survey Expedition. He was present when the Telegraph Line reached Darwin from the Arafura Sea to the north and from the south, and made a remarkable series of portraits of the Larrakia and related groups as they weathered the storm of European contact. In charge of policing on a frontier which was often violent, Foelsche's relations with Aboriginal people were complex, and yet he managed to acquire a remarkable ethnographic collection and his photographic studio, a few metres from the Telegraph Station, was well frequented by Larrakia visitors to Port Darwin. His portraits comprise the fullest record of an Australian Aboriginal group during the first, intense years of contact with Europeans. Foelsche was unusual among frontier collectors in that he made a meticulous record of the Aboriginal names and uses of the objects he collected, together with the names, ages and language groups of his portrait subjects.  

Of the three sections of the Overland Telegraph Line, the Northern Section proved to be the most difficult. The logistic challenges of supplying the contractors’ needs by sea, firstly at Port Darwin and later at the Roper River, were greatly compounded by the two Wet seasons of 1871 and 1872, which brought the work to a standstill. Wagon-loads of equipment became bogged or abandoned, and were soon supplying Aboriginal people with a remarkable, unprecedented source of metal. Alfred Giles, a member of the Northern party, noted that an abandoned wagon which he had passed five weeks earlier, in June 1871, ‘nearly new and perfectly sound’, had been stripped of all iron bolts and clamps, ready for conversion into knives, axe blades and spear points.

By 1870 Aboriginal people along the Line’s Northern Section had already become familiar with metal, partly through earlier European and Macassan contact along the northern coast. The supply wagons of the construction parties, as well as the Line itself, now became a new source of supply. The surveyor John Knuckey was able to barter for several axes fashioned from the metal footplates of telegraph poles by Tjingili men near Newcastle Waters. Knuckey passed these axes to Charles Todd himself, in a cycle of reuse and exchange.

The Tennant Creek repeater station was built in Warumungu country, close to the important dreaming site of the Jurnkurakurr waterhole. Warumungu man Dick Cubadgee (Japaljarri) was born in 1870 just before the Overland Telegraph Line was built and he grew up near the new telegraph station. Moving freely between two worlds, he became a guide and cultural broker on European expeditions and participated in colonial exhibitions in the south. But according to Philip Jones, he was equally 'aware of the increasing pressure which European pastoralism imposed upon his people' and he argued before his early death that Europeans should pay with cattle for possession of Warumungu land. Like the other repeater stations, Tennant Creek was a significant point of contact between Europeans and Aboriginal people from its inception.

In 1934, the postmaster at Tennant Creek, George Ashton, wrote to the anthropologist Charles Mountford describing the population growth at Tennant Creek, now a budding gold town. He was responding to Mountford’s request to send Aboriginal drawings of ethnographic interest. Ashton didn't have access to any traditional Aboriginal art, but sent a sketch of the telegraph station by Warumungu senior man Nat Warano Williams. In his history of Tennant Creek, Dean Ashenden writes that Williams worked in the cattle industry and later with the army during the second world war. A nephew of Dick Cubadgee (Japaljarri), he was well known for his skills as a tracker and artist. His works included artefacts he painted for sale to tourists.