At the School of Cybernetics, we have an abiding interest in the histories of science, technology, and large-scale systems. We believe knowing such histories gives us better questions, reveals pitfalls and lessons already learned, and ultimately helps inform our understanding of present and future systems.
The Australian Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) is a historical feat of particular interest to us. The OTL was a significant nineteenth-century engineering project that linked undersea cables from Java via Darwin to Adelaide, connecting Australia to the rest of the world. Completed in 1872, the OTL was an important pre-digital information and communication system that reshaped our ideas and experiences of time, space, and geography. It encompassed the latest technology (telegraphy), cultural practices, and environmental challenges.
Gathering historical data and studying a node in the southern section of the system – the Strangways Springs Repeater Station – we are exploring the OTL as a cybernetic system. We are interested in the creation of the system, as well as its day-to-day management and impacts. While the OTL is, first and foremost, celebrated as one of the greatest engineering achievements in Australia and an important nation building exercise, it was also interwoven with a range of other human, technical, and ecological systems. It is, among many other things, an inter-colony power play, a source of conflict between Indigenous peoples and settlers, an enabler of new categories of work and employment, and the driver of new kinds of knowledge and information. Approaching the OTL as a cybernetic system can generate key lessons and insights valuable to the designing, building, running, regulating, and decommissioning of new large-scale technologies.
Outputs of this project will include a research repository, public lectures, installation material for a telegraphic pole, and an illustrated book.
Completed research outputs:#
- Wool, Wires and Water: Technological Transitions at Strangways Springs (2025)
- One complete system? Telegraphy, cybernetics and industrial archaeology (2024)
- Ann Moyle Lecture (2023)
