22 August 2022 marks 150 years since the completion of the Overland Telegraph Line.
Join us as we launch a new website that revisits the history of the Line as a transcultural frontier. While the Line holds a celebrated place in national memory as a feat of colonial engineering, this website aims to reframe the Line’s significance through a more inclusive cultural narrative by highlighting the consequences of the Line’s path through Aboriginal Country, and the vital role played by other non-Europeans in its construction and along its route. With an emphasis on the Overland Telegraph’s transcultural history and afterlife, the website foregrounds the Line’s place both as a tool of colonial expansion and as a complex zone of cross-cultural contact and exchange.
Image: Tennant Creek telegraph station, sketch by Warumungu artist and tracker
Nat Warano Williams [SLSA D5044 (L)]
WHEN
Monday 22 August
TIME
6pm
This initiative is a collaboration between Australian Catholic University, the
History Trust of South Australia, the South Australian Museum and the
State Library of South Australia.