Wool, Wires and Water: Technological Transitions at Strangways Springs

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.