Strangeways Springs has nothing to do with Manchester or The Smiths (as far as I know). It’s situated about 10,000 miles away, in the desert of South Australia, near Lake Eyre. In the 19th century it was a pastoral settlement, an Overland Telegraph Repeater Station and a point along the Ghan railway. Those are all now gone, but there are several standing and ruined structures – dwellings and animal pens, a kitchen, a store, a police station (so another Strangeways prison?) and a grand water tank (picture below).
The natural springs that enticed Europeans here were used for centuries by the Aboriginal occupants of this region – the Arabunna people. Dense spreads of flaked and ground stone tools pepper the rocky surface. I wonder what the settlers thought of these physical traces of the Aboriginal presence, which long outstretched that of Europeans? What did the Aborigines, those that survived the ravages of colonisation, make of the Europeans? Like so many places in Australia, it is impossible to understand colonial history without thinking about what came before.
This was a truly remote outpost of the British empire. It made me think of the lengths to which settlers went to support Britannia’s appetite for the colonies’ products such as wool. It also made me think of the ultimate failure of this endeavour. Here, the settlers were on the wrong side of Goyder’s Line of rainfall, and like dozens of other places along the railway line and telegraph wire, it was a short-lived occupancy. In a strange way, Strangeways Springs does have something to do with the Second City of the British empire.
