Australia’s Overland Telegraph Line was completed in 1872. For more than 50 years, it served as a telecommunication backbone for the country, and many stories emerged around it. In later years, it also helped shape road and rail infrastructure, which in turn created a corridor for travel and tourism and fueled a new set of stories for how Australians thought about and saw themselves. In the 1920s, white settler women travelled along the route of the Line, encroaching on previously male-dominated spaces in colonial Australia and helping reignite the public imagination of the telegraph and its narrative place. This paper examines the intersection of the Overland Telegraph Line, Australian tourism and the role of women’s narratives and actions, including the extent to which these women disrupted or ‘destroyed’ the supposed ‘masculine’ patterns of the outback.
Bell et al. (Thu,) studied this question.