One complete system? Telegraphy, cybernetics and industrial archaeology

Abstract

Telegraph systems laid the groundwork for the first global digital systems. In Australia, 50 years before Federation, the continental-scale telegraph system linked to the wider world using submarine connectors. Little previous work has been done to reveal the materiality of the complex technological and human systems necessary to support continental scale telegraph systems. Here we explore Australian telegraphy, focusing on the Overland Telegraph Line (OTL) and through three distinct lenses: historical evidence, cybernetics and industrial archaeology. We use the Strangways Springs telegraph site as a case study. While archaeology has previously dealt with telegraph sites, it has largely treated them as isolated parts of a larger ‘story’ rather than interdependent components of a technological system. We see cybernetics as a means to understand the OTL as a connected system through which information flows, mediated by the technical and human elements at the various nodes and parts of the system. A cybernetically-informed industrial archaeology reveals how the study of systems requires a wide range of forms of evidence: from the physical heritage through to various archives related to technology, regulations and individuals. A cybernetic approach as advocated here shifts our thinking from connection to that of interdependency, as every element of the system (technical, social, and ecological) needs to function for the whole to operate.