From the frontier

by Patrick Michael Byrne

"In the nineteenth century the centre of the continent was, to white Australians, a vast forbidding emptiness. The completion of the Overland Telegraph Line in the 1870s brought with it a new knowledge of the area, as well as a number of intruders to a landscape familiar to Aboriginal people for thirty thousand years. Among the newcomers were a policeman, Ernest Cowle, and a telegraph official, Paddy Byrne, living in frontier settlements hundreds of kilometres from the nearest Europeans.". "From 1894 to 1925, Cowle and Byrne wrote letters to pioneering anthropologist and biologist Baldwin...

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